Rhea is Co-Founder and CTO at Kita, a document intelligence platform that transforms messy borrower documents into fraud-checked signals for lenders in emerging markets like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico. Kita was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch and is based in San Francisco.

Rhea earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University, where she was advised by Jeannette Bohg and Oussama Khatib. She was an incoming PhD candidate in Computer Vision and Robotics before choosing to build Kita full-time.

Rhea received the 2025 Firestone Medal, the highest honor in Stanford's Computer Science Department, for her thesis on robust robot learning. She joined her first research lab at age 13, worked at Pfizer on the COVID-19 vaccine during her gap year, and has authored 7 papers recognized at international conferences.

Before Kita, Rhea was a researcher at the Stanford Robotics Center and Interactive Robot Perception Lab, focusing on humanoids, mobile manipulation, and long-horizon robot learning. She is also the founder of Synapse, a STEM mentorship nonprofit providing free engineering curriculum to girls' schools in 8 countries.

Rhea is a US Presidential Scholar and Intel ISEF Grand Award winner who has won multiple international science fairs. She has spoken at the United Nations on women's health, given a TED Talk, and launched a podcast on NPR about STEM accessibility and education.