From a shared frustration to a million users in under a year
When Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni launched Phia last spring, they weren’t trying to reinvent online shopping in some abstract, technical way. They were responding to something more familiar and more frustrating.
Shopping online had started to feel noisy and inefficient – a life full of tabs, filters, and second-guessing. And their solution was to build something that felt human again, like a trusted friend helping you make the final call.
That idea has gained traction quickly. Less than a year after launch, Phia – a fashion tech platform that let’s shopper compare prices across thousands of retailers – has just raised $35 million in Series A funding at a $185 million valuation. The round was led by Notable Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures and returning investor Kleiner Perkins.
Gates and her friend Kianni have spent the last 11 months focused on building Phia around how people actually shop today – socially, intuitively, and with AI quietly working in the background.
The result is an AI shopping agent that sits directly inside the shopping experience, offering guidance in real time, while decisions are still being made.
As users flocked to the app, investors followed
Since launching in April 2025, more than one million people have used Phia, and over 6,200 brands have joined the platform. Those brands range from contemporary labels to luxury fashion houses, and the startup says shoppers who arrive through Phia are more likely to buy and less likely to return what they purchase.
For users, the appeal is confidence. For brands, it is customers who show up with clearer intent.
Much of Phia’s early momentum has been driven directly by its team. Gates and Kianni leaned heavily into social platforms rather than traditional advertising, building an audience through content that reflected how they talk about shopping themselves.
That founder-led approach helped Phia grow a following of more than two million people and reach hundreds of millions of views without relying on the typical startup marketing playbook.
With new funding in hand, the founders are focused on deepening the experience rather than simply expanding it. Upcoming features are designed to make the app feel more personal over time, including taste recommendations, individualized rewards, and shared digital closets curated by the community.
On the brand side, Phia plans to roll out tools that offer clearer insight into how shoppers discover, compare, and decide in real time.
Behind the scenes, the company is investing heavily in its AI infrastructure. Phia already processes millions of searches a day and ingests vast amounts of product data. The longer-term goal is to move beyond reactive recommendations and toward AI agents that can anticipate preferences, adjusting to a user’s taste as it evolves.
They weren’t trying to disrupt retail – they just wanted shopping to stop feeling like work
Kianni has described Phia as a lean, “high-agency” team focused on execution and difficult problems at the intersection of consumer behavior and artificial intelligence. “If you want to execute with velocity and work on hard problems at the intersection of commerce and consumer AI, Phia is the place to do it,” Kianni explains.
For Gates, the mission has been about alignment, making sure technology works in service of real consumer intent rather than steering people toward choices they do not actually want: “We built Phia to be a win for shoppers and brands.”
Moving forward, investors see Phia as part of a broader shift in how people shop online. As investor Hans Tung, who has also backed companies such as Airbnb, Anthropic, and TikTok, has noted, shopping was built for an internet of pages and filters.
But now, AI increasingly sits between people and products, and the challenge is understanding taste, trust, and intent as they happen.
Gates and Kianni believe that if they get this right, online shopping will start to feel less like a chore and more like a conversation, one that adapts quietly to each person over time.
