2x founder

Rhea Malhotra

CTO at Kita | AI for underwriting

Co-founder

Kita· Winter 2026🇺🇸 Stanford, California, United States

in LinkedIn 𝕏 @_rheamalhotra_

2025Co-founder· Kita (YC W26)

Founder · since 2018

Company

Kita (YC W26)

Role

Co-Founder

current

Stage

—

no public source

Raised

—

no public source

Based

San Francisco, CA

current

Founder / co-founder — the company's markEmployee / research role

Source: LinkedIn work history

Profile coverage5 of 7 · missing posts, contact

Kita

Automate credit assessment for lenders in emerging markets

Winter 2026

Experience

Career

Kita (YC W26)
Co-founder
Co-Founder · San Francisco, CA · 2025 – Present
2025
Stanford University
CS + Robotics research · Palo Alto, California, United States · 2024 – Present
2024
Stanford University
Autonomous Systems Lab · Stanford, California, United States · 2023 – Present
2023
Stanford Robotics Center
Robotics Engineer · Stanford, California, United States · 2023 – Present
2023
Stanford Women in Computer Science
Board Member · Palo Alto, California, United States · 2021 – 2024
2021
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Computational Biology Research Fellow · New York, New York, United States · 2022 – 2023
2022
Hinge Health
Software Engineer · San Francisco, California, United States · 2023
2023
Mass General Hospital
Radiology & AI Research Intern · Greater Boston · 2020 – 2021
2020
Pfizer
Research Scientist · Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States · 2020 – 2021
2020
NPR
Founder
Host of NPR Segment · 2018 – 2020
2018
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Computational Biology Research Intern · Boston, MA · 2019 – 2020
2019
Regeneron Scholar
Research Science Institute (RSI) · Boston, MA · 2019
2019
Luxembourg ExpoSciences Forum
USA Representative at EU Science Forum · Luxembourg, Luxembourg · 2019
2019
Facebook
International Swiss Talent Forum · Nottwil, Switzerland · 2019
2019
USA Representative
European Union Contest for Young Scientists · Dublin, Ireland · 2018
2018
Best of Category Biochemistry
Intel International Science & Engineering Fair - Grand Award · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · 2018
2018
Intel ISEF
Delaware Valley Science Fair · Greater Philadelphia Area · 2018
2018
TED Conferences
TED Talks Speaker · 2017
2017

Bio

Rhea is the co-founder and CTO of Kita. Rhea completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science at Stanford, and was an incoming PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics at Princeton. She received the Firestone Medal, the sole highest honor of the Stanford CS Department, for her research in 2025. Rhea joined her first research lab at age 13, worked on the COVID-19 vaccine at Pfizer at 17, and has since authored 7 papers recognized and awarded internationally.