Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni’s new app Phia is making fashion shopping as easy as booking flights, and investors like Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber are buying in.
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There’s a new buzzy fashion startup turning heads, and it comes from next-gen founders Phoebe Gates (daughter of Bill Gates) and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni.
Their app, Phia, is being called the “Google Flights for fashion.” It helps users compare prices on fashion items across the web, making online shopping smoother and smarter.
The duo just raised a massive $8 million seed round, and it only took three-and-a-half weeks. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with big-name backers like Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, and Sheryl Sandberg joining in.
Even though Phia only launched in April, it’s already seeing traction with 500,000 users and a new search tool that looks through over 300 million fashion items. The goal? To build a one-stop shop where you can track everything you’ve browsed, bought, or might want next.
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Phia’s rise comes from keeping it very Gen Z:
- Founder-led content on social media
- DM feedback loops with users
- Viral marketing experiments powered by ChatGPT
- A podcast called The Burnouts (launched in April), which has nearly 500,000 Instagram followers and 10M+ views across platforms
Kianni, already known for founding the climate nonprofit Climate Cardinals and advising the UN, says the podcast helps them “open source” their startup journey, sharing wins, mistakes, and lessons with other young entrepreneurs.
With only a 12-person team, Gates and Kianni plan to use their fresh funding to hire more talent (yes, via social media) and keep building toward their bigger vision: a personalized shopping agent that could one day sync with your calendar to suggest what to buy, sell, or keep.
As Gates puts it, the future of fashion is about “making access easier than ever.” And Phia is betting Gen Z is ready to shop that way.
