There is a version of the tech-funding story where the headline is the money, and a more interesting version where the headline is who, exactly, decided to part with it.
Phia – the AI shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni in April 2025 – has just delivered both. The company has confirmed the investor cohort behind its oversubscribed $35.5 million Series A, and the roster is as much a cap table as it is a VIP guest list.
The new celebrity backers include Khloé Kardashian, Alix Earle, Mindy Kaling, Karlie Kloss, Jessica Alba, Ashley Graham, Halsey, Jay Shetty, Olivia Culpo, Winnie Harlow, Lori Harvey, Bobbi Brown, Rachel Zoe, Sophia Amoruso, Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, among many others – a sweep of the exact creators, founders and tastemakers a millennial and Gen Z female audience already follows.
View this post on Instagram
But the round also pulled in a genuinely heavy bench of tech operators: Vladimir Tenev, founder of Robinhood; Iqram Magdon-Ismail, founder of Venmo; Charles Porch, VP of Global Creative Partnerships at OpenAI; Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO and President at Ariel Investments; Naomi Gleit, Head of Product at Meta; and Mati Staniszewski, founder of ElevenLabs. When the people who built Venmo and Robinhood are buying into your consumer app, that’s just as meaningful a signal as the famous faces.
The institutional money is serious, too. Originally announced in January 2026, the Series A was led by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins at a $185.5 million valuation. It follows Phia’s $8 million seed round, also led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin and Hailey Bieber – bringing the company’s total funding to $43.5 million in roughly a year.
View this post on Instagram
So what does Phia actually do, underneath the constellation of investors? In plain terms, it’s a free app and a companion shopping agent designed to make you a sharper buyer. It scans more than 350 million products to help shoppers find the right pieces at the best price, and the company credits that with a 50% reduction in return rates – a number worth dwelling on, because returns are the quiet environmental and financial sinkhole of online fashion.
The companion Shopping Agent slots into Safari and does the work most of us attempt manually and badly: it calculates resale value, surfaces better-priced alternatives, applies exclusive discount codes and alerts you to price drops in real time.
Recent additions push it from “smart search” toward something more like a personal shopping operating system: a points-based rewards programme that earns gift cards with select brand partners, centralised shopping carts across multiple retailers, and a digital closet that organises your past purchases. By learning each user’s style and preferences over time, Phia is positioning itself across the whole journey – discovery, purchase and the murky afterlife of resale and reuse.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni are redefining shopping with Silicon Valley precision
The traction numbers, if you take them at face value, are striking for a one-year-old company. Phia says it has grown to more than 1.5 million users and over 9,600 retail brand partners spanning contemporary, resale and luxury; it claims to be on pace for nine-figure sales growth this year; it was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions; and it has generated more than 1 billion views and 2.7 million followers across its platforms. That last figure is its own kind of moat – a consumer app that’s also a media brand, with built-in distribution most startups would sell a kidney for.
There’s a reason this particular founder story keeps drawing capital and attention. Phia is led by two young women building consumer AI for a category – fashion, resale, the everyday financial paper-cuts of overspending – that the broader, male-dominated AI gold rush has largely ignored in favour of enterprise dashboards.
Phoebe Gates carries an obvious surname, and an irresistible pun, given that the whole app is built to do away with gatekeeping, swinging the doors wide on better prices rather than guarding them. And the product, the traction and the operator-led round suggest something built rather than borrowed.
Some of the products and services featured in this article may be from our affiliate partners, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links — at no extra cost to you. Our editorial team only spotlights what we genuinely love and think you will, too.
Leave a Comment