The Glossy 50 honors the year’s biggest changemakers across fashion and beauty. More from the series →
When Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni launched Phia in April 2025, they set out to provide something that hadn’t existed before: a real-time AI shopping assistant capable of helping users make smarter, faster and more confident decisions. In eight months, the platform has surpassed 750,000 downloads, partnered with 5,000 brands and resellers, and firmly established itself as one of the most rapidly adopted AI-native retail startups.
“Getting to build the team of our dreams has really been the highlight for us,” said Gates, whose father is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. “We’ve been able to hire incredible, hungry young people who are shaping the future of fashion and commerce. Seeing their hard work recognized — like with this nomination — means a lot.”
For the former Stanford classmates, the idea for Phia was born out of personal frustration with online shopping. “We were just tired of how inefficient it was,” said Kianni. “The way people shop online hasn’t really changed since Amazon launched. You can get anything instantly, but the actual experience hasn’t evolved. We wanted to use AI to make it more intuitive, personal and rewarding.”
Phia’s iOS app and browser extension compare prices across 350 million products from 40,000 retailers, calculate resale value, summarize product details, and alert users to price drops, all in real time. Shortly after launch, the company rolled out a proprietary search model that reduced latency by 80%.
“That [search model] rollout was huge,” said Kianni. “It made results faster and more accurate, which immediately boosted engagement.”
The most popular feature so far has been Phia’s mobile Safari extension. “People love that it gives instant insights as they shop,” said Kianni. “It’s simple: One click, and you can see the resale value of an item. Shoppers are thinking about cost-per-wear and secondhand potential, and that’s something our users care deeply about.”
Phia’s core audience is Gen Z and millennial women and “urban, fashion-obsessed shoppers,” as Gates described. With more than half a million users engaging through the app, Phia’s data pipeline is now powering new features like trend maps and personalized discovery feeds. “We’re seeing what people in New York versus Texas are wearing, and feeding that back to our community,” said Gates. “Every interaction, like what people buy, skip or return, helps our algorithm learn and improve.”
Phia, which recently closed a $30 million funding round valuing the company at $180 million, has attracted a high-profile group of backers including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sheryl Sandberg, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin and existing lead investor Kleiner Perkins. The company is channeling its new capital primarily into engineering and AI infrastructure. “Over half our team is technical talent,” said Kianni. “Our goal is to keep investing in personalization to make results feel unique to every user.”
That personalization is central to Phia’s next phase. The team is developing a “digital closet” that automatically catalogs users’ past purchases to create a real-time style profile. “We want to go from being your shopping advisor to your full shopping agent,” said Gates. “You’ll have your taste, purchase history and preferences in one place, which will power smarter recommendations.”
Despite growing competition in the AI shopping space, the founders view new entrants as validation. “All of these innovations are great for the industry,” said Gates, talking about OpenAI partnering with Walmart. “We want to be the consumer-facing layer, like your shopping agent, but with taste. Our goal is to make every purchase decision informed, confident and effortless.”
As they approach their first year in business, Gates and Kianni are focused on scaling responsibly by building trust, refining technology and empowering their team. “The team you build is the company you build,” said Kianni. “We’re creating something bigger than us that is a platform, a culture and a community that’s reimagining how the world shops.”
