There is a new buzzing fashion startup in town. Meet Phia, a shopping app founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe and her Stanford roommate-Slash co-founder Sophia Kianni.
Phia searches the network to help users compare prices for fashionable items. It’s a mobile app and browser extension that is essentially “stylish Google Flights for Fashion”.
“When we consider what the future of fashion will look like five years ago, it will be making it easier for people to get access to things that were previously inaccessible,” Gates told TechCrunch.
The app is One of many fashion startups In this era of artificial intelligence, an attempt to make the online e-commerce world easier.
So far, investors and consumers like this category. Even Phia, which just launched in April, said it already has about 500,000 users.
In early September, it also announced $8 million seed wheel Phoebe Gates, 23, told us that it only took three and a half weeks to get a salary increase. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, including other investors including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
Phia has now conducted new and improved searches for the app, which involves over 300 million stylish items, Kianni said. The goal is to make the e-commerce shopping experience seamless – in this place, customers can see everything they have purchased or searched for before and find new items that are causing people.
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Gates and Kianni met two years ago and started working on the app a year after they met. The first product they made was the desktop chrome extension, which helped users find used alternatives when shopping online. “It’s getting bigger and bigger,” Kenny recalls.
User feedback also shows that most of their peers are shopping on their phones, not on their desktops. Additionally, Kenny said young people are more interested in instant price checks than second-hand comparisons. “We decided to really adjust our focus,” she said.
“We should be honest about this from our actions,” Gates added. “The girl who is obsessed with shopping and scrolling often does it on her phone; the laptop is more at work, but the phone is key.”
So Gates and Kianni started building a new application.
Kiannia said the first check Phia received actually came from one of Stanford’s social entrepreneur programs. Once traction began to increase, Gates and Kianni decided that further execution of their vision required venture capital.
They researched top funds in order to pitch for their own rounds, especially hoping to become famous women as investors. But before they started the fundraising campaign, the Soma capital was indifferent to Kianni on LinkedIn after hearing the product. The company eventually offered one of the initial institutional checks.
“From there, they really introduced us to a lot of incredible people,” Kenny said. “We ended up doing a cold publicity and then letting others connect with us.”
Their rounds are a merger of some of the most buzzing people in business and technology, and a collision of two powerful networks.
Kianni himself is a famous activist. Established a nonprofit climate bishoptransform information about climate change into different languages. She is one of the youngest ever, becoming a UN adviser and appears on a multitude of 100 women including the BBC.
In addition to Jenner and Bieber, the rest of the round include billionaire Michael Rubin, Spanx founders Sara Blakey and Sheryl Sandberg. Soma eventually introduced them to Kleiner Perkins’ team, who eventually led the kind of sub-subs.
“I started working in e-commerce, so I have always believed in the power of technology to change the way people shop online,” Rubin said in a statement from TechCrunch. “What excites me about Phia is how Phoebe and Sophia bring real innovation into the space by making shopping smarter and using technology to create better experiences for everyone.”
Most of Phia’s marketing is also typical of Z Gen Gen: focusing on organic, public-oriented content. For example, she and Gates are open to the experiments they conducted with Phia. They ask people to guide them to send them feedback and use social media to hire talent and source designers. And them Use chatgpt help Marketing through the pursuit of the virus campaign.
They also got some help from the podcast The Burnouts, which launched in April, to attract attention from their products. It has Nearly one million Followers on Instagram. Kianni said the podcast helped to raise interest to Phia, as it focused on sharing career advice to young people, especially women. She said it has accumulated 10 million views on various social media platforms.
She continued that podcasts allowed them to “open source” how she and the gate built their own company and talked through all the trips and obstacles, which in turn could help others who want to start a company in this space.
“We’ve taken a very digital-first approach to doing almost everything,” Kenny said. “I think that’s part of the reason we’re seeing such rapid traction.”
Gates and Kianni said the new capital will be mainly used to build teams (currently only 12 people) and they will naturally recruit through social media. Overall, the duo sees Phia as the future of personalized shopping.
Gates said she even hopes to one day build a personalized agency that can help sync the calendar and tell customers when to buy, what, what to resell and what to keep.
“There is a lot more that we still need to do, and we want to learn and grow more,” Kianni added. “We want to be able to do this publicly so that our audience can learn and grow with us.”
