TLDR: Phia, an innovative AI-powered shopping platform co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has successfully raised $8 million in seed funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, with significant participation from high-profile investors including Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner. This capital infusion will fuel the development and expansion of Phia’s AI shopping agent, which aims to revolutionize the online retail experience by offering real-time price comparisons, resale value calculations, and personalized shopping assistance.
Phia, the pioneering AI-driven shopping agent, has announced the successful closure of an $8 million seed funding round, spearheaded by leading venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The significant investment, revealed on September 18, 2025, also saw participation from a roster of notable figures, including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, Desiree Gruber, and Sheryl Sandberg, underscoring strong confidence in the startup’s vision to transform the e-commerce landscape.
Co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, Phia launched its iOS app and mobile browser extension in April 2025. The platform provides consumers with an intelligent AI agent designed to streamline the shopping process. This agent offers real-time functionalities such as comparing prices across over 40,000 retail and resale sites, calculating potential resale values, summarizing product details, and tracking price drops, enabling users to make more informed purchasing decisions instantly.
Since its inception, Phia has rapidly gained traction, amassing approximately 500,000 users within five months. The company has also forged over 5,000 direct brand partnerships and has been instrumental in driving tens of millions of dollars in sales. This rapid growth highlights the market’s demand for more efficient and intelligent shopping solutions.
The newly secured capital will be strategically deployed to accelerate Phia’s next phase of growth. Key areas of investment include expanding its world-class team across engineering, AI research, product development, and marketing. Phia is also committed to investing in proprietary model development and robust GPU infrastructure to effectively manage large-scale data and facilitate the expansion of its platform into new retail verticals. Concurrently, the company plans to bolster its consumer brand and cultivate new partnerships to broaden the reach of its AI shopping agent.
Phoebe Gates, Phia co-founder, articulated the company’s mission, stating, “AI is reshaping nearly every industry, but shopping is stuck in the past. Consumers still waste hours comparing prices and hunting for deals, only to still end up overpaying.” Sophia Kianni, also a co-founder, added, “We started Phia to make it easy for consumers to find the best price on items they love and to create a new search engine for shopping that learns from user data at scale to deliver personalized results.” Annie Case, a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, echoed this sentiment, noting, “During diligence, we saw Phia tackling key pain points: helping consumers compare prices and discover new brands, while giving brands lower acquisition costs, better discoverability, and smarter retargeting.”
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Phia currently boasts an extensive database, hosting billions of fashion products and ingesting hundreds of millions more daily. It also maintains one of the largest secondhand fashion databases in the U.S., indexing over 300 million items. Looking ahead, Phia plans to introduce a highly personalized shopping agent, powered by a proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) trained on millions of user transaction data points, further enhancing the bespoke shopping experience.
