Phia’s founders are used to moving fast, but a New York City snowstorm recently forced an unusual slowdown. With streets buried and travel discouraged, co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni ended up working from separate apartments instead of side-by-side. Even then, startup life didn’t stop. While the founders stayed put, some teammates still pushed through to the New York office, sharing photos of snow piling up outside.
That sense of momentum mirrors what’s happening inside the company. Phia is only about ten months old, yet it has already secured a fresh $35 million funding round led by Notable Capital, with Khosla Ventures participating and Kleiner Perkins returning. The raise comes shortly after an earlier $8 million round that drew attention thanks to high-profile backers including Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, and Sheryl Sandberg. Gates, who is the daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, has also been clear that the business is not being funded by her parents.
So why are investors moving so quickly? Phia is betting that the online shopping experience is overdue for a major upgrade. The founders believe consumers have been stuck with clunky, impersonal commerce for decades, and that a personalized, end-to-end experience powered by AI is finally possible now.
Phia’s early traction helps explain the confidence. The company says it has hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, has grown revenue 11x since launch, and has onboarded 6,200 retail partners.
At the moment, Phia operates as a mobile app and a web browser extension designed to help shoppers save money. The core idea is simple: if you’re about to buy something new, Phia can surface resale or second-hand alternatives first. For example, if you’re looking at a $200 dress, it may point you to the exact same item on a resale marketplace for far less. For shoppers dealing with rising prices, that promise—finding the best deal without endless searching—can be the hook.
There’s also a sustainability upside to buying second-hand. Kianni is known for her work as a climate activist and her experience advising the United Nations. But Phia’s strategy is grounded in what consistently wins shoppers over: convenience and savings. Alongside resale recommendations, the platform can also suggest similar items from more affordable brands, a capability tied to its growing list of retail partnerships.
Those partnerships are central to Phia’s business model. When brands make sales through the platform, Phia earns a cut, similar to affiliate marketing. And as the company gathers more performance history, it says it can demonstrate measurable benefits to partners—such as higher average order value, stronger new customer acquisition, and lower return rates.
Another major driver of Phia’s rapid rise is founder-led marketing. Gates and Kianni are Gen Z entrepreneurs with significant social reach, totaling more than 2 million followers across platforms. They also host a podcast, The Burnouts, where they discuss building a business and interview notable names across business and entertainment, from Bryan Johnson to Paris Hilton. That direct connection to audiences has helped them build awareness quickly in a crowded shopping and fintech landscape.
Looking ahead, the founders want Phia to become more than a deal-finder. Their bigger ambition is to build what Gates describes as a “holistic shopping agent”—an AI-powered assistant that can guide the entire shopping journey. With the new funding, the company plans to hire top machine learning engineers to accelerate that vision. Although Phia’s team is currently around 20 people, the founders argue it’s less about headcount and more about recruiting exceptional talent that can build advanced personalization systems.
Their long-term view is a shopping experience that feels tailored to each person, rather than a generic product grid. Gates imagines an era where shoppers don’t bounce between countless static pages. Instead, the experience would adapt to your tastes, sizes, and even what you already own. In time, she wants users to start at Phia before they start shopping anywhere else—using personalized feeds, outfit recommendations, and tools that help you understand what to keep, what to donate, and what to resell.
But creating that level of personalization requires collecting and interpreting user data, and that comes with responsibilities and risks—especially when a product includes a browser extension.
Phia has already encountered a challenge on that front. In a previous report published by Fortune, cybersecurity researchers flagged a feature in Phia’s browser extension that could capture the HTML code of websites visited while using the extension—effectively pulling data connected to browsing activity. The company removed the feature after it was brought to their attention and said the extension had logged webpage content only to identify whether a site was a shopping destination. Phia also stated it has never stored that data.
Kianni says the company aims to be transparent about why it requests permissions and how user information is handled. She also emphasized that data is intended to be aggregated and anonymized, and used specifically to help users find the best products more efficiently.
If Phia succeeds, its appeal won’t just be about getting a lower price. It will be about compressing the time and friction that make online shopping feel like work: opening dozens of tabs, comparing prices manually, hunting for alternatives, and second-guessing purchases. The founders believe AI agents can eliminate a lot of that hassle and guide shoppers to the “shortest path” to the right item.
Phia is building for a future where shopping becomes faster, more personal, and more enjoyable—while also making the broader commerce ecosystem more efficient. Whether it becomes the go-to AI shopping agent it aims to be will depend on execution, trust, and how well it balances personalization with privacy. For now, the company is growing quickly, hiring aggressively, and betting that the next major shift in online shopping will be driven by AI.
