Lending Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

In emerging markets, open finance is still nascent. Most of the population is traditionally unbanked, banking APIs don’t exist, and a borrower’s financial history lives in documents: e-wallet records, bank statements, utility bills, and more. Because this data is unstructured, credit and risk teams are forced into manual review. This slows decisioning, increases costs, and caps lending volume. Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We help lenders in emerging markets automate application completion, document verification, and underwriting from messy financial documents — using AI to extract fraud-checked data and localized risk signals that power faster, better credit decisions. Under the hood, Kita is a learning engine. We link document-level signals to repayment outcomes, allowing our models to continuously improve fraud detection and risk assessment over time. This creates a compounding advantage for lenders as their distinct underwriting decisions feed back into the system. We’re Carmel and Rhea. We met before Stanford and have been building together ever since. Carmel is from Manila, is a repeat founder, and spent three years in product at Apple. Rhea has a research background in computer vision and received the highest honor in Stanford Computer Science. Together, we combine deep local context with strong technical execution to build the infrastructure that expands access to credit in emerging markets.

Veritus is a omni-channel platform for deploying AI agents for loan servicing and collections, including inbound and outbound voice agents. Our agents negotiate repayment plans, follow up across channels, and drive recoveries with zero human involvement. By combining cutting edge voice AI with deep regulatory compliance and vertical specialization we're able to drastically reduce the cost-to-collect while increasing recovery rates.

Today, onboarding, servicing, and collections still depend on large human teams — which means operations scale linearly with loan volume. PathPilot deploys specialized AI agents that handle 60–80% of high-volume operational workflows, turning human-heavy processes into scalable software. These agents operate alongside internal teams — embedded directly into existing systems. This allows lenders to grow loan volume and revenue without proportional headcount growth.

Hi - Mark and Gab here! We met while working at Alt, a marketplace for collectibles, where we built a $200 million specialty finance business line. At Alt, we faced the complex challenges that come with servicing consumer loans. We spent countless hours and resources developing internal tools to manage loan payments, communicate with borrowers, and keep track of loan performance—all while ensuring a positive experience for our customers. However, after dealing with the headaches of manual data entry, fragmented systems, delayed payments, lack of personalized borrower engagement, and the stress of maintaining accurate records, we knew there had to be a better way to service consumer loans. So, we started Finosu to build the servicer we wish we had—an AI-powered consumer loan servicer designed to streamline and enhance every aspect of the loan servicing process. Our mission is to transform loan servicing into a seamless, efficient, and customer-centric experience. The operational cost of servicing loans reaches into the tens of billions a year and that is money out of the pocket of lenders, borrowers, investors, and ultimately the consumers as a cost of doing business – we are changing that.

Yenmo offers a better way to access cash for India’s 65 million investors who either resort to personal loans at over 18% interest or have to liquidate their investments when in need of money. With Yenmo, they can pledge their investments digitally and instantly get a loan at a fixed 10.5% interest rate. Our Insight - In India, over 30% of personal loan borrowers have active investments and are paying double the interest rate they qualify for with us.

Express Building (EB) helps small and medium sized residential developers scale their pre-sold affordable housing development pipeline. Current markets: Indonesia & Philippines

We are a Y Combinator / Latitud backed micro-lending platform in Mexico led by talent from companies such as Capital One, Bain & Company, Konfio, DiDi, Clip, Klarna, etc. We are hyper focused on making sure that customers improve their financial lives significantly through their relationship with us. In a very short time, we have achieved significant traction with exceptional consumer outcomes and unit economics. We are also building and incorporating a significant amount of AI into our operations, so this is a great place to work for anybody who has ambitions to build real time applications of AI. Our goal is to build the biggest AI enabled consumer fintech platform in Mexico and eventually LatAm.

Pantore Pay is the solution for restaurants cash flow issues and allows restaurants to shop for supplies and pay any other bills using Pantore's credit line.

Fintelite's AI streamlines loan approvals and fraud detection, ensuring swift, accurate decisions. Revolutionizing lending with AI-powered bank statement analysis and transaction data enrichment. Fintelite empowers lenders with a next-generation approach to lending. Our AI platform utilizes: Bank statement analysis: Gain deep insights into borrower financials through automated analysis. Transaction data enrichment: Extract valuable details from transactions for a holistic financial picture. These capabilities enable lenders to: Reduce fraud: Identify and prevent suspicious activity with superior accuracy. Accelerate approvals: Make faster, data-driven decisions with enriched information. Optimize risk management: Tailor risk assessments based on comprehensive borrower data. Passionate about building a future of responsible AI in financial services. I'm committed to helping lenders serve customers efficiently and securely. Our help to others includes: • BlubyBCA and ANZ increased efficiency by 15% • Qazwa and KoinWorks sped up loan processing 10x, cutting costs by 25%

Baubap is LatinAmerica's firts AI-powered, credit-focused bank. Today we're the leading AI lending app in Mexico

A mobile app. It allows employees to get paid whenever they want, instead of just once a month (or biweekly). We sell it to companies as an employee benefit (B2B SaaS).

Z1 is a digital banking app made for teenagers and young adults. By using the Z1 app and a prepaid card linked to their account, teenagers can begin their road to financial independence by learning to manage and spend their money, as well as having a place to receive money they earn through jobs and small businesses.

We help companies embed lending services into their software so they can better serve their customers by helping them access capital, increase engagement in their product, improve retention and expand their revenue per user.

Kredi is rocket mortgage for LatAm.

Level provides fast and simple financing to lending startups that gets them off the ground and grows with them as they scale. We do so by buying loans in small quantities at first and rewarding our customers with more access to capital based on performance. Co-founder & CEO, Vladimir Korshin, previously worked in the traditional venture debt system at Silicon Valley Bank, where he noticed that strong startups were frequently denied from non-dilutive financing because they were too small. Just 4 weeks after going live with our first customer, we purchased $1.3M in loans across 6 customers. The founding team brings 30+ years of startup experience: Vladimir previously worked as an operator at Facebook, Eventbrite, and Niantic; Asa Schachar was an engineer at Microsoft and managed teams of engineers at Optimizely; Molly Hogan led new and international product initiatives at Amazon for over 7 years. Level is backed by Liquid2, Y Combinator (S21), and others. https://www.trylevel.app/

Stilt/Onbo enables you to launch credit products without a bank sponsor. We have built APIs to abstract complexity around licenses, regulatory compliance, underwriting, loan management system, credit reporting, and debt capital. We are backed by fintech investors including Y Combinator, Link Ventures, Hillsven Capital, Petrushka investments (early backer of Lending Club, Zillow, Check, Pets.com), and CEOs of billion-dollar fintech companies.