Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni turned their Stanford dorm room into a startup lab.
It’s a time-honored tradition at Stanford, a rite of passage many tech bigwigs have undertaken. Gates and Kianni started as randomly assigned roommates, but soon bonded over their shared love of activism and business. And, like many aspiring Stanford founders before them, they were looking for an idea—pinning up articles in their kitchen, calling potential customers from their floors, and scribbling on a whiteboard.
One topic kept emerging over and over: clothes, both the ones scattered about their dorm room and what they were looking to buy. Both avid secondhand shoppers, Kianni and Gates realized they did a lot of research before buying anything—and that they weren’t alone.
“We wanted to create something that could do all of our shopping for us,” said Kianni. “Do it instantly and effortlessly, rather than all the manual price comparison and tab-opening we were doing on our computers.”
The idea took a minute to take off. They were rejected from one entrepreneurship class, then accepted into another, attracting some early pre-seed funding from Soma Capital and a Stanford professor who liked their pitch. The pitch was an early iteration of what they’re doing now: In 2023, Gates and Kianni moved to New York to start Phia, an AI-driven shopping agent. Phia—an app and mobile browser extension—launched in April 2025, and has since reached 500,000 users and more than 5,000 direct brand partners. (Kianni and Gates also have their own podcast, The Burnouts, via Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, launched in April.)
“During the time we were building the MVP [minimum viable product], we ended up going out and—even though it was awful—giving it to about 500 different users,” said Gates (who, yes, is the daughter of Bill and Melinda). “The stats we were seeing were incredible, huge repeat purchase rates, retention was huge. Mind you, at the time Phia was not perfect… But I remember there was one day we took the MVP down, because it wasn’t working the way we wanted. And people reached out: ‘Where’s Phia?’”
Phia, a portmanteau of both Kianni and Gates’ first names, has now raised $8 million in seed funding,
Fortune has exclusively learned. Kleiner Perkins led the round. It’s a star-studded affair, with participation from Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sheryl Sandberg, Spanx’s Sara Blakely, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, and
eBay Ventures, among others. To Kleiner Perkins partner Annie Case, Phia is building on broader economic and consumer tailwinds.
“There is a shift towards value,” Case said via email. “American consumers are price selective, deal-driven, and less brand loyal. Phia is meeting the moment.”
The U.S. e-commerce apparel market, as Case points out, is huge, crossing $200 billion this year and heavily skewed towards mobile. Despite the market’s size, the digital shopping experience hasn’t evolved over the last decade as much as you’d think.
“I think there’s been so little innovation in the shopping space for so long because it seems like ‘well, that’s a hobby for girls,” said Kianni. “The reality is that the fashion industry is worth between $1.7 and $2.5 trillion.”
E-commerce tools have fallen in and out of vogue with VCs over the last few years. It’s a tough market, with lots of unanswered questions about the future. Because shopping on a discretionary level isn’t just personal—it’s sociological and expressive. And often, why we want what we want is mysterious, even to us. But Kianni and Gates are looking for answers in a process that’s about conversation and experimentation.
“We’re talking to over four users a day,” said Gates. “Every other week, we have 40 young women come to our office who are power users. And we tell them: ‘Roast our app. Tell us what you hate. What do you want to see in the future?’”
Like that Stanford dorm room, Phia is its own kind of lab.
“We are scientists,” Gates added. “We need to be consistently running experiments. If users don’t like it, we go back to the drawing board… We ask: Why is that? What can we fix here?”
Term Sheet Podcast…This week, on the Term Sheet Podcast, we have Phia! I spoke with Phoebe, Sophia, and Annie about what’s wrong with online shopping today, how to build a consumer company, why there aren’t more women building companies, and what AI tools can bring to the digital shopping experience.
Listen and watch here.StubHub…Today, StubHub is expected to go public. This marks another long-anticipated public markets debut as the IPO market continues to loosen up.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinksEmail: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.comSubmit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter
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