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Is Phoebe Gates’s Phia the Most Celeb-Backed Shopping Startup of All Time?
Alix Earle, Khloé Kardashian, Sydney Sweeney, Mindy Kaling, Sophia Bush, Alexandre Arnault, Karlie Kloss — Phia has added a roster of more than 30 names to its cap table. What now?
Phia, the AI shopping app launched in April 2025 by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, wants to win the AI shopping race.
Phia’s browser extension tool scrapes the internet while you shop, offering alternatives to whatever product you’re looking at, like a similar item at a better price or the same pair of pants available secondhand on Ebay; it’s designed to be a smarter shopping companion. Now, more than a year in, Phia is rolling out new tools that match its bigger ambitions to be a full, soup-to-nuts AI shopping platform. To do so, the duo recruited a laundry list of celebrity angel investors to support their mission — perhaps culminating in one of the lengthiest star rosters ever assembled by a startup.
The line-up includes: LVMH scion Alexandre Arnault, Khloé Kardashian, Alix Earle, Mindy Kaling, Karlie Kloss, Eileen Gu, Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Priyanka Chopra, Jessica Alba, Shaboozey, Ashley Graham, Halsey, Wendi Murdoch, Brooks Nader, Chriselle Lim, Sophia Amoruso, Rachel Zoe, Winnie Harlow, Lori Harvey, Ice Spice, Cait Bailey, Olivia Culpo, Amy Griffin, Lilly Singh, the other Nader sisters (Mary Holland, Grace Ann, and Sarah Jane), The Chainsmokers, Leila Hormozi, Gunna, and Jay Shetty.
All have joined the company’s $35.5 million Series A funding round — first announced as a $35 million round in January, now oversubscribed — which brought Phia’s total funding to $43.5 million at a valuation of $185.5 million. The Series A round was led by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, and includes tech stars such as OpenAI’s Charles Porch, Robinhood founder Vladimir Tenev, and Venmo founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail. Phia’s first round counted notable backers Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sheryl Sandberg, and Sara Blakely.
AI shopping apps are becoming a dime a dozen in today’s goldrush. Why do so many backers want a piece of Phia?
“This angel investor cohort is proof that the [AI] consumer shift is real and that Phia reads it best,” says Gates. “The names are evidence. We really thought about two kinds of credibility when bringing people on, either operators and founders who built the last era of consumer tech, or cultural tastemakers who actually are or represent Phia’s consumers.”
After 14 months up and running, the company reports 1.5 million users of its browser extension and app and 9,600 brand partners. Phia makes its money by taking a cut of sales made using its extension, and claims that these purchases have a 50% lower return rate than average. “We wanted to capitalize on that momentum, so we brought on some incredible cultural icons and tastemakers aligned with our thesis: the future of fashion is going to be oriented around taste,” says Kianni.
Whether or not AI can actually crack taste is a recurring debate among tech circles. Phia claims that it can understand taste by understanding its users on an individual level: remembering brand, style, color, and price point preferences, while storing past purchases and making it easier to access interesting inventory in the depths of resale sites. “Fashion is an industry where women, in particular, are spending enormous amounts of time and money, and we have the least personalization to show for it,” says Gates. “I mean, you and I are going to a big retailer’s site and having the exact same experience. So this idea of, how can we create something that actually cuts through the noise and tells you what’s worth buying, and go really deep in understanding how consumers actually shop for fashion.”
Personalization has long been a common calling card for retailers promising better experiences. This has only ramped up in the AI and agentic shopping era, with AI startups like Phia and shopping and discovery engine Daydream positioning a deep knowledge and appreciation of fashion as a key differentiator to big tech companies like Google and ChatGPT, who are pushing further into AI-enabled shopping tools. Last week, Google rolled out a Universal Cart that lets shoppers add items from multiple sites to a single cart, calling it an “agentic shopping hub”.
A similar one-stop shopping cart is part of the new suite of tools Phia has rolled out alongside its price and product comparison extension to build a more complete AI shopping experience, along with a digital closet pulled together from past purchases and a rewards system that allows users to earn gift cards. The next layer of the shopping funnel Phia wants to crack, by way of a personalized shopping agent, is discovery. With influencers like Earle now on board, Gates and Kianni see social commerce and affiliate marketing as the next step in growing into a full-service shopping agent.
Phia’s new rewards system gives users points that can be turned into gift cards.
“We very much want to build toward that social commerce direction, understanding from our consumer interviews that people are really inspired by tastemakers,” says Kianni. “That’s why we’ve brought a lot of those tastemakers into the fold — to think about how we can allow them to share what they’re shopping with their followers, because we can see that’s a huge trend underpinning e-commerce right now.”
Phia as an AI affiliate platform certainly places it at the center of another race: platforms from ShopMy to TikTok Shop are turning influencers into merchants that use their followings to sell products. Phia’s catalog of 350 million items from retailers and resale sites could, then, become a way for these creators to sell, backed by an AI-enabled understanding of individual user preferences and, yes, taste. It also wants to offer shoppers a way to break out of the sameness of the algorithm to be able to better hone their personal style.
“The next phase is that Phia will know what you want to buy before you do,” says Gates, with a curated feed considering factors like price point, resale value, material quality, similar consumer reviews, and what you’ve already purchased. Phia’s thesis is that customers are savvier than ever — about what secondhand items are the biggest scores, when to buy new versus used, what materials to avoid, and what to splurge on. The company hosts bi-weekly user feedback dinners to hear from customers about what they want from the experience and what they struggle with while shopping. The main point of feedback? A lack of personalization.
“Getting shopping discovery right is no small feat — time and time again companies have tried this and not been able to get it right,” says Gates. “How do we understand your active shopping intent as well as your historical patterns and what we know you love? How do we deal with your taste changing over time? Getting that curation and customer experience to be so good is something we’re constantly thinking about and iterating on as a team.”
Visual search is part of Phia’s AI shopping experience.
With so many notable names now invested in the company’s success, Phia is likely poised to make strides in the crowded AI shopping space. But the biggest challenge facing companies sparring in the same arena as Google, which pretty much everyone uses already, is securing awareness. How will Phia use this star power to their advantage?
“We want these angels shaping what this product is going to look like,” says Gates. “These people have such incredible taste, curation. We want them around what we’re building. And a lot of these people have also built the future of technology. So I’d say for us, the most core thing, beyond distribution, is really having [the investors’] insights as we’re shaping the product and understanding what we’re building for our consumers.”
