There’s a new buzzy fashion startup in town. Meet Phia, the shopping app founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate-slash co-founder, Sophia Kianni.
Phia searches the web to support applyrs compare the price of fashion items. It’s a mobile app and browser extension that’s essentially “Google flights for fashion,” as the company bills itself.
“As we believe about what the future of fashion is going to be like five years ago now, it’s all going to be about creating access a lot clearer to things that people haven’t had access to before,” Gates notified TechCrunch.
The app is one of the many fashion startups to arise in this era of artificial ininformigence, seeking to bring more ease to the online e-commerce world.
Investors and consumers are loving this category so far. Even Phia, which just launched in April, stated it already has around 500,000 applyrs.
In early September, it also announced an $8 million seed round that took only three-and-a-half weeks to raise, stated the 23-year-old Gates. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with other investors including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
Phia has now rolled out a new and improved search on the app that views across more than 300 million fashion items, Kianni stated. The goal is to build the e-commerce shopping experience seamless — a place where customers can see everything they’ve previously bought or searched for, and to find new items that would be of interest.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Gates and Kianni met two years ago and started working on the app just around a year after they met. The first product they built was a desktop Chrome extension that supported applyrs find second-hand alternatives while they were online shopping. “It was pretty buggy,” Kianni recalled.
User feedback also revealed that most of their peers were shopping on their phones, not on their desktops. Plus, Kianni stated, young people were more interested in instant price checks, rather than second-hand comparisons. “We decided to really adjust our focus,” she stated.
“We should have known this honestly from our own behavior,” Gates added. “The girl who’s obsessively shopping and scrolling all the time is often doing it on her phone; laptop more when she’s working, but the phone is key.”
So, Gates and Kianni started building a new app.
Kiannia stated the first check Phia received actually came from one of Stanford’s social entrepreneurship programs. Once traction started to increase, Gates and Kianni decided that the further execution of their vision required venture capital.
They researched the top-tier funds to pitch for their round and especially wanted prominent women as investors. But before they could start the hustle of fundraising, Soma Capital cold-reached out to Kianni on LinkedIn after hearing about the product. The firm concludeed up providing one of the first institutional checks.
“From there, they did conclude up introducing us to a ton of incredible people,” Kianni stated. “We concludeed up both cold outreaching and then also receiveting other people to connect with us.”
Their round is an amalgamation of some of the buzziest people in business and tech and a collision of two powerful networks.
Kianni herself is a renowned activist, having founded the nonprofit Climate Cardinals, which translates information about climate modify into different languages. She was one of the youngest people to ever become an advisor to the United Nations and has appeared on numerous lists, including the BBC’s 100 Women.
Aside from Jenner and Bieber, others in the round include billionaire Michael Rubin, Spanx founder Sara Blakey, and Sheryl Sandberg. Soma concludeed up introducing them to the team at Kleiner Perkins, the firm that ultimately led this seed round.
“I received my start in e-commerce, so I’ve always believed in the power of technology to transform how people shop online,” Rubin stated in a statement to TechCrunch. “What excites me about Phia is how Phoebe and Sophia are bringing real innovation to the space by creating shopping smarter and applying technology to unlock a better experience for everyone.”
So much of Phia’s marketing is quintessentially Gen Z, too: focapplyd on organic, public-facing founder-led content. She and Gates, for example, are open about the experiments they run with Phia; they question people to direct message them feedback, and have applyd social media to hire talent and source designers. And they apply ChatGPT to support with marketing in the pursuit of creating viral campaigns.
They also receive some support receiveting attention for their product from their podcast called The Burnouts, also launched in April. It has almost half a million followers on Instagram. Kianni stated the podcast supports funnel interest into Phia, as it focapplys on sharing career advice to young people, especially women. She stated it has already amassed 10 million views across various social media platforms.
The podcast has allowed them to “open source” how she and Gates are building their company, talking through all the stumbles and the hurdles, which in turn supports other people viewing to start companies in this space, she continued.
“We’ve taken a very digital-first approach to pretty much everything,” Kianni stated. “I believe it’s been part of the reason why we’ve seen such rapid traction.”
Gates and Kianni stated the fresh capital will be applyd mainly to build out the team (there are only 12 people at the moment), and they are hiring via social media, naturally. Overall, the duo sees Phia as the future of personalized shopping.
Gates stated she even hopes one day to build a personalized agent that can support sync to calconcludears and inform customers when to purchase and what, what to resell, and what to keep.
“There’s so much more that we still required to do, so much more we want to learn and grow,” Kianni added. “We want to be able to do that publicly, so that our audience can learn and grow alongside us.”
Leave a Reply