Phia is an innovative AI-based shopping agent founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. The company recently announced that it has secured $8 million in seed funding, with Kleiner Perkins leading the round. Other notable investors also joined in, including high-profile individuals such as Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, Desiree Gruber, and Sheryl Sandberg. This backing signifies strong confidence in Phia’s potential to transform the online shopping experience.
Launched in April 2025, Phia offers a user-friendly iOS app and a mobile browser extension that serve as a powerful shopping assistant. This technology is designed to help consumers make smarter buying decisions by comparing prices across various retailers, calculating the resale value of items, summarizing product details, and tracking real-time price drops. By providing these features, Phia aims to make the shopping process more efficient and less overwhelming for users. In just five months since its launch, the app has gained an impressive user base of 500,000 and established over 5,000 partnerships with direct brands. It has also helped generate tens of millions of dollars in sales, showcasing its early success in the market.
Phia’s platform hosts a vast array of fashion products, currently cataloging billions of items and continuously ingesting hundreds of millions more every day. Additionally, it maintains one of the largest databases for secondhand fashion in the United States, with over 300 million items indexed. This extensive collection not only highlights the wide range of available products but also emphasizes Phia’s commitment to supporting sustainable fashion through its secondhand offerings.
Going forward, Phia plans to enhance its services further by introducing a personalized shopping agent. This new feature will be powered by a proprietary large language model, trained on millions of data points gathered from users’ transactions. By utilizing advanced technology, Phia aims to interpret large datasets with remarkable efficiency.
The company has developed special multimodal agents that can analyze data ten times faster and at half the cost compared to traditional models. This improvement will enable Phia to offer personalized product recommendations tailored to each user’s unique tastes, shopping habits, and budget.
With the recent funding, Phia is set to expand its operations significantly. The company intends to build a world-class team across various departments, including engineering, AI research, product development, and marketing.
This expansion will help accelerate the company’s growth and improve its service offerings. Phia is also dedicated to investing in the development of proprietary models and ensuring it has the necessary GPU infrastructure to handle large-scale data efficiently. Additionally, the company aims to broaden its platform by exploring new markets and verticals.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Phoebe Gates, Phia co-founder
“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.”
Sophia Kianni, Phia co-founder
“Phia is redefining how people make purchase decisions. 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.”
Annie Case, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
“Phia is perfectly positioned to disrupt E-commerce with AI. It’s a product I believe in, in an industry I care deeply about, and I’m proud to help champion what they’re building.”
Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics and investor in Phia
