Phia, a shopping agent co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has raised a $35 million Series A financing at a $185 million valuation as it looks to expand what it describes as an “AI alignment layer” connecting consumers and brands. The round was led by Notable Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures and returning investor Kleiner Perkins.
Launched in April 2025, Phia said it has surpassed 1 million users in roughly 10 months and built partnerships with more than 6,200 retail brands spanning contemporary and luxury categories. The company said those partners represent billions of dollars in annual gross merchandise volume, and that Phia drives millions of dollars in sales for brands each month while delivering 11x revenue growth since launch.
Phia positions its product as an AI shopping agent embedded into a consumer’s natural shopping flow, offering real-time insights intended to improve purchase decisions. The company said its growth has been fueled by founder-led organic marketing, citing more than 2 million followers and over 430 million views across its owned social platforms. Looking ahead, Phia said it plans to introduce individualized rewards, taste-aware recommendations, and community-curated digital closets.
On the brand side, Phia said it operates with a zero-dollar upfront, performance-based model. The company also said it will expand partner tools with dashboards that provide real-time visibility into audience behavior, emerging trends, and category positioning.
Phia said the new capital will be used to accelerate core AI capabilities and the underlying machine learning infrastructure supporting product ingestion and search at scale. The company said it ingests billions of new products and processes millions of searches daily, and that infrastructure work has reduced search latency by 80% while increasing monetized GMV by 40%. The roadmap also includes real-time LLM agents designed to personalize shopping experiences and predict consumer preferences.
Notable Capital Managing Partner Hans Tung said AI is shifting commerce away from page-and-filter discovery toward agent-mediated interactions, where the key challenge becomes understanding intent, taste, and trust in real time. Phia said it plans to use the funding to hire and expand its brand partner network as it targets an end-to-end shopping and discovery platform.
KEY QUOTES
“We are a lean, high-agency team focused on building the category-defining AI commerce platform. 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. This funding allows us to bring in exceptional talent to scale that mission.”
Sophia Kianni, Co-Founder, Phia
“We built Phia to be a win for shoppers and brands, helping people discover products they love while enabling brands to build stronger customer relationships. By aligning with real consumer intent and transparent preferences, we help partners acquire high-intent customers who buy with greater confidence and satisfaction,”
Phoebe Gates, Co-Founder, Phia
“Historically, shopping was built for an internet of pages and filters, not one mediated by agents. Now, AI sits between people and products, and the challenge is no longer access. It is understanding intent, taste, and trust in real time. Phia is building the intelligence layer for that shift.”
Hans Tung, Managing Partner, Notable Capital
