Carmel Limcaoco is Co-Founder and CEO of Kita (YC W26), a document intelligence platform that transforms messy borrower documents into fraud-checked signals for lenders in emerging markets. Originally from Manila, Philippines, she combines deep local market expertise with technical innovation to expand access to credit.

Carmel studied Symbolic Systems and Music at Stanford and was completing her Master's in Computer Science before founding Kita. She spent three summers in audio and music product at Apple, where she was one of few interns to ever ship a feature in iOS.

Carmel was awarded by the United Nations at age 16 for her film work and launched the first Product Fellowship in the Philippines. She co-founded DAHA in 2022, taking Stanford's first marketplace from 0 to 1, demonstrating her repeat founder status.

Kita is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch and uses vision-language models and computer vision to outperform traditional OCR. The platform is hyperlocalized for emerging markets like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico, with plans to expand to underserved U.S. segments.

Kita's learning system links document-level signals to repayment outcomes, continuously improving fraud detection and risk assessment over time. This creates a compounding advantage for lenders as their underwriting decisions feed back into the system, helping expand financial access in markets where banking APIs don't exist.