Bill Gates’ Youngest Daughter Raises Another $8 Million

Recently, the U.S. AI shopping platform Phia announced it secured $8 million in seed funding. Phia was co-founded by Bill Gates’ youngest daughter and her roommate.

 

 

The funding round consisted entirely of newly issued common stock, with no debt component, led by Kleiner Perkins. The follow-on investors form a star-studded lineup of “celebrities and unicorn founders.”

 

This includes supermodel and Rhode Skin founder Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner of Kylie Cosmetics and other family brands, Spanx founder and self-made billionaire Sara Blakely, Fanatics founder and U.S. sports e-commerce titan Michael Rubin, former Meta COO and Lean In founder Sheryl Sandberg, and producer Desiree Gruber, known for Project Runway.

 

Such a high-profile group of backers is rare even in global venture capital circles.

After Nearly 20 Years, Kleiner Perkins Bets on Shopping Search in Seed Round Again

Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, outlined three core reasons for leading the round in the due diligence report:

1. Real Pain Point, High Frequency. Online apparel penetration in the U.S. is at 42%, but on average, a consumer needs to open 5.6 browser tabs and spend 11 minutes to “compare prices and decide.” Phia streamlines this to “one click, three seconds.”
2. Untapped Resale Market. The U.S. secondhand/resale market hit $38 billion in sales in 2024, growing 17% annually, yet lacks a horizontal price comparison layer. Phia has indexed 300 million secondhand items, creating a data flywheel.
3. Early-Mover Advantage with Young Users. In five months since launch, Phia gained 500,000 users, 67% of whom are women aged 18-30, with an LTV/CAC ratio of 4.1, well above the industry average of 2.3.

This marks Kleiner Perkins’ first seed-stage bet on the “shopping search” space since investing in Amazon in 2006.

 

According to PitchBook’s same-day entry, Phia’s post-money valuation reached $32 million, with this round’s investors holding 25% of the company, Kleiner Perkins accounting for about 15%.

Roommates Frustrated by Online Shopping Sparked the Idea

Public records show Phoebe Gates, born in 2002, is the youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, a 2024 Stanford graduate in international policy. She interned at Vogue Paris and has long written a sustainable fashion column.

 

Co-founder Sophia Kianni, also born in 2002, is an Iranian-American Stanford climate communications major. She’s one of the youngest UN “Young Leaders for the SDGs” and was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2023.

 

The two became roommates as Stanford freshmen in 2021. Frustrated by needing to visit ten websites to buy a vintage Levi’s pair, they hatched the idea for Phia.

 

In fall 2023, Phia’s prototype, “ShopBot,” was launched as a Stanford d.school project. They manually scraped six secondhand sites, with 40 classmates joining the beta test.

Three Rounds Done, Series A Next Year

Last year, their team secured a $100,000 check, their first funding, from the Gates family office, Cascade Investment, at an $8 million post-money valuation. Two engineers then joined, integrating “ShopBot” with Google Vision API, pushing SKU coverage past 100 million.

 

On April 24 this year, “ShopBot” officially launched as the Phia brand with an iOS app and Chrome extension. Within 48 hours, Phia cracked the App Store’s shopping free list Top 30 and was dubbed a “Gen Z must-have money-saving tool” by Teen Vogue.

 

Before this round, Phia raised $1.2 million in a Seed-Prime (pre-seed) round in June last year from Offline Ventures, at a $15 million post-money valuation, mainly for hiring engineers and brand partnerships.

 

Phia said its next round (Series A) is planned for Q3 2026, targeting $25-30 million, with a focus on international expansion (starting with the UK and EU) and developing a generative AI shopping assistant.