Kita

Automate credit review for lenders in emerging markets

Head of Growth

$120K - $160K0.50% - 1.50%San Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Operations
Experience
Any (new grads ok)
Visa
US citizen/visa only
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Rhea Malhotra
Rhea Malhotra
Founder

About the role

About Kita

In emerging markets, credit infrastructure is broken. Lenders rely on messy documents, fragmented borrower communication, and manual review

Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We automate loan origination, application completion, document verification, and credit review for lenders in markets where underwriting is still trapped in messy documents and manual follow-up — from the Philippines and Mexico to the US. Kita’s AI credit officer works directly with borrowers over WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, and email to collect missing information, resolve inconsistencies, and keep applications moving, while our AI underwriter extracts fraud-checked data and localized risk signals from chaotic financial documents to support faster, higher-quality credit decisions. The result is a more complete application pipeline, dramatically lower manual review burden, and a lending operation that moves faster without compromising risk control.

We’re a Stanford AI team backed by Y Combinator, top funds, and leading angels across Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia. During the YC batch, we grew ~40% week-over-week with customers across three continents. Our CTO was ranked #1 in Stanford CS in 2025.

The opportunity

Kita (YC W26) is hiring a Head of Growth to lead go-to-market, sales operations, and strategic relationship building across our core markets. This is a high-ownership role at the intersection of fintech, banking, enterprise sales, and product strategy.

You will work directly with the founders to drive revenue, shape distribution, build repeatable sales motion, and expand Kita’s presence across lenders, banks, fintechs, and strategic partners. We are looking for someone who can operate across enterprise sales, partnerships, customer development, conference and market presence on the ground. A core element will be understanding the technical and operational realities of selling into regulated financial institutions, across differing markets.

What you’ll work on

  • Own Kita’s go-to-market strategy across banks, fintech lenders, non-bank lenders, and strategic partnerships
  • Manage the company’s sales pipeline, outbound motion, follow-ups, and reporting
  • Develop partnership channels with platforms, banks, consultants, development institutions, and other distribution partners
  • Work closely with the founding team to refine positioning, pricing, sales collateral, customer narratives, and market strategy
  • Help translate customer needs into product priorities by developing a strong understanding of technical workflows and underwriting operations
  • Run highly organized GTM operations, including pipeline management, meeting preparation, follow-up discipline, pilot tracking, and revenue forecasting

Strong candidates will likely have:

  • Experience in growth, enterprise sales, partnerships, or GTM at a fintech, AI, bank, etc.
  • Strong understanding of lending, underwriting, credit, fraud, risk, or banking operations
  • Experience selling to regulated financial institutions
  • Strong operational discipline
  • Ability to operate in a fast-moving, high-ownership startup environment
  • Technical fluency and comfort understanding APIs, integrations, and product workflows

Especially exciting backgrounds include:

  • Experience in SME lending, consumer lending, underwriting infrastructure, or credit products
  • Prior work in LatAm, Southeast Asia, or other emerging markets
  • Experience with technical fintech products and enterprise deployments
  • Technical background

About Kita

Kita (YC W26) is building the AI credit infrastructure layer for lenders in emerging markets.

In much of the world, the important financial data to underwrite loans still lives in messy documents.

Traditional OCR breaks on the files lenders actually rely on, so credit teams are still stuck doing manual review. We’re building VLMs to automate the work a credit officer does today: parsing documents, detecting fraud, cross-checking information, and extracting real risk signals for underwriting.

This is a deeply technical problem at the intersection of vision, reasoning, and financial systems.

You’d ship quickly, work directly with users, travel across LatAm, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and help define both the product and engineering culture from day one.

Kita
Founded:2025
Batch:W26
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Carmel Limcaoco
Carmel Limcaoco
Founder
Rhea Malhotra
Rhea Malhotra
Founder