SOURCE Phia

NEW YORK, Sept. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Phia, the AI-powered shopping agent founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, today announced its $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from investors such as Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, Desiree Gruber, and Sheryl Sandberg.

Launched in April 2025, Phia's iOS app and mobile browser extension gives consumers a powerful AI agent that compares prices, calculates resale value, summarizes product details, and tracks price drops in real time to help them make smarter decisions instantly. In five months, Phia has amassed 500,000 users, secured over 5,000 direct brand partnerships, and driven tens of millions of dollars in sales.

"AI is reshaping nearly every industry, but shopping is stuck in the past," said Phoebe Gates, Phia co-founder. "Consumers still waste hours comparing prices and hunting for deals, only to still end up overpaying."

Sophia Kianni, Phia co-founder, adds, "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."

Phia currently hosts billions of fashion products and ingests hundreds of millions more each day. It also has one of the largest secondhand fashion databases in the U.S., with over 300M items indexed.

"Phia is redefining how people make purchase decisions," said Annie Case, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. "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."

In its next iteration, Phia will introduce a personalized shopping agent powered by a proprietary LLM trained on millions of datapoints from users' transactions. To overcome the cost of interpreting a large data set, Phia has built proprietary multimodal agents that do it at 10x the speed and half the cost compared to off-the-self GPTs. Phia's shopping agent will deliver personalized purchase suggestions tailored to each user's tastes, behaviors, and budget.

"Phia is perfectly positioned to disrupt E-commerce with AI," said Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics and investor in Phia. "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."

With this funding, Phia will grow a world-class team across engineering, AI research, product, and marketing to accelerate the next phase of growth. The company is investing in proprietary model development and GPU infrastructure to handle large-scale data while expanding its platform into new verticals. At the same time, Phia will build out its consumer brand and partnerships to bring Phia's shopping agent to a wider audience.

About Phia

Phia is an AI-powered shopping agent that helps users find the best pieces across 40,000+ retail and resale sites instantly. Phia combines real-time price intelligence, resale insights, and AI-driven recommendations to streamline every buying decision. Founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, Phia is headquartered in New York City with a team from Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Georgia Tech, and alumni of Pinterest, Amazon, Meta, and Google.

Learn more and download at Phia.com

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