There is a new and talked about fashion startup in town. Meet Phia, a shopping app founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, co-founder of Stanford’s roommate Slash.
Phia searches the web to allow users to compare prices for fashion items. This is a mobile app and browser extension that is essentially “Google Flights for Fashion” as the company itself charges.
“It all will make access to things that people have not previously had access to,” Gates told TechCrunch.
The app is one of many fashion startups that occur in this age of artificial intelligence and is looking to bring more easiness to the online e-commerce world.
Investors and consumers have always loved this category. Even Phia, which just launched in April, said it already has around 500,000 users.
In early September, Gates, 23, announced that the $8 million seed round had also taken three and a half weeks. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and was with other investors, including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
Phia is currently rolling out new and improved searches with apps that can be viewed along with over 300 million fashion items, Kianni said. The goal is to make your e-commerce shopping experience seamless. This is where customers can see everything they previously purchased or searched for, and find new items of interest.
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Gates and Kianni met two years ago and began working on the app about a year after they met. The first product they built was a desktop Chrome extension that helped users find second hand alternatives while shopping online. “It was pretty buggy,” Kiani recalls.
User feedback also revealed that most of the peers shop on their mobile phones rather than on their desktops. Additionally, Kiani said the young people were more interested in immediate price checks, rather than second-hand comparisons. “We really decided to adjust our focus,” she said.
“We should have known this honestly from our own actions,” Gates added. “A girl who is constantly shopping and scrolling often does it on the phone. When she is working, it’s a laptop, but the phone is important.”
So Gates and Kianni began building a new app.
Kiannia said the first check that Phia received actually came from one of Stanford’s social entrepreneurship programs. As traction began to increase, Gates and Kianni decided that venture capital would be needed to further implement the vision.
They researched first-class funds to pitch for their rounds, and wanted women who were particularly well-known as investors. But before they began the fundraising fuss, Soma Capital was sobered up by Kianni on LinkedIn after hearing about the product. The company was to offer one of its first institutional checks.
“From there, they were introducing us to a lot of incredible people,” Kiani said. “We’ve become both cold outreaching and connected to others.”
Their round is a fusion of some of the most talked about people in business and technology, and a clash between two powerful networks.
Kianni himself is a well-known activist and founded the non-profit Climate Cardinals, which translates information on climate change into a variety of languages. She is one of the youngest ever to be an advisor to the United Nations and has appeared on many lists, including 100 women in the BBC.
Besides Jenner and Bieber, others in the round include billionaire Michael Rubin, Spanx founder Sara Blakey and Sheryl Sandberg. Soma ended up introducing them to the team at Kleiner Perkins, the company that led the seed round.
“I got off to a start with e-commerce, so I’ve always believed in the power of technology to change the way people shop online,” Rubin said in a statement from TechCrunch. “What excites me about Fear is that Phoebe and Sofia are bringing real innovation to the space by making shopping smarter and using technology to unleash better experiences for everyone.”
Much of Phia’s marketing is typically also Gen Z. For example, she and Gates are open about experiments performed on Phia. They asked people to send messages to them for feedback and used social media to hire talent and source designers. And they use ChatGpt to help marketing in pursuit of creating viral campaigns.
It also helps to draw attention to the product from a podcast called The Burnouts, which was released in April. Instagram has almost 500,000 followers. Kianni said the podcast will help focus on Phia as it focuses on sharing career advice to young people, especially women. She said she has already accumulated 10 million views on various social media platforms.
The podcast allows her to “open source” how she and Gates are building their company, and she continues, which will help others seeking to start a company in this area, discussing it through all the stumblings and hurdles.
“We took a very digital-first approach to almost everything,” Kiani said. “I think this was part of the reason we saw such rapid traction.”
Gates and Kianni said the fresh capital is primarily used to build teams (only 12 people at the moment). Overall, the duo sees Phia as a personalized shopping future.
Gates said he hopes to one day build a personalized agent that can sync with the calendar and tell customers when to buy, what, what to resell, and what to keep.
“There’s still a lot we need to do. We want to learn and grow,” Kianni added. “We want to make it public so that our audience can learn and grow with us.”
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