In the kitchen of the Kris Jenner house, a twentysomething sits drinking tea with one of the most powerful cultural figures in America today. Phoebe Gates did not come to ask for a job. She came to offer a place on the cap table of her newly launched app. Jenner agreed. Three months later, Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, Sheryl Sandberg from Lean In and Hailey Bieber with Rhode beauty sat at the same table. In September 2025, Phia closed an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, with a line-up that a conventional consumer commerce founder could not have assembled in five years. It closed the entire seed round in three and a half weeks.
In January 2026 it added a $35 million Series A at a $185 million valuation, led by Notable Capital. In mid-April 2026 it passed one million users. Time named it one of the best inventions of the year. Forbes put Phoebe Gates in its 30 Under 30, and Time in its Time100 Next. On top of that, 6,200 retail partners and 11× revenue growth since launch.
All of this within a year of the app’s launch.
In Phia’s case, the cap table is a product in its own right. It launched the app together with the audio show The Burnouts and took its guests on as investors.
A Stanford dorm and a Bluetooth tampon
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni met by chance at Stanford. In their first year, the university assigned them as roommates. They bonded over a shared interest in activism and entrepreneurship.
The idea for Phia was born on the couch in their dorm room. “We would spend hours sitting on our little couch looking for the perfect spring dress, the perfect pants or jeans for the first day of school,” Gates told the Stanford Daily. Before Phia they tried other ideas, including a Bluetooth tampon that went nowhere. Phia is a portmanteau of their first names.
Phia launched the app and a browser extension in April 2025. Within five months it had 500,000 users and 5,000 brand partners. By April 2026 it had one million active users and 6,200 retail partners.
The duo that started with an audience
Phoebe Gates was born in 2002. She is the daughter of Bill and Melinda French Gates. She completed a BS in Human Biology at Stanford in June 2024, in three years, with a minor in African studies. Alongside her studies she worked as a reproductive rights advocate, interned at Partners In Health in Rwanda and wrote essays for Vogue and Teen Vogue. In January 2023, still a student, she co-founded Phia.
Sophia Kianni is a year older. Born in 2001 into an Iranian-American family, she grew up in Northern Virginia. She completed Stanford in 2025. When she was twelve, she visited relatives in Iran and looked up at the sky at night. She could not see the stars. The pollution was too strong. That experience was the start of her later work.
As a teenager she began translating climate literature for Iranian relatives from English into Persian, because the topic was missing from Iranian media. That personal initiative grew into the non-profit Climate Cardinals. According to its own data, the organisation now has 16,000 volunteers in 134 countries and translates climate materials into more than 100 languages.
In July 2020, António Guterres appointed her to his Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. She was 18. She was the youngest member of the seven-person group and the youngest UN adviser in US history. Her TED Talk “Language shouldn't be a barrier to climate action” has more than 2 million views.
When Kianni and Gates came up with Phia together as second-year Stanford students, each already had a recognisable brand after a year. Together they have more than 2 million followers and 430 million views across social networks.
Vestiaire Collective, ThredUp or Poshmark, between 2015 and 2020, started with a product and treated marketing as a cost (CAC, customer acquisition cost). Phia started with an audience and converted CAC into equity dilution.
The product behind the Series A
The Phia app and browser extension compares buying a new product with a second-hand alternative. An Anthropologie dress for $200 is shown as the same piece on Poshmark for $80. The revenue model is affiliate, with a performance-based fee from brand partners. No upfront cost for the brand, just a share of conversions.
Phoebe Gates described the product briefly to TechCrunch: “Commerce itself for the consumer hasn't really been adapted in the last 30 years, and the opportunity to make a truly personalized, end-to-end shopping experience is today.”
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in October, both founders described how AI is changing online shopping, from manual price comparison to automated agent workflows.
Operating data from the Series A press release look strong. Brands report a 13% higher conversion rate, 30% stronger new customer acquisition, 15% higher average order value and a return rate more than 50% lower. Search latency fell by 80%, and monetised GMV rose by 40%. On top of that, 6,200 retail partners and 11× revenue growth since launch.
These are the company’s own figures, not an independent audit. Phia is 10 months old and, according to publicly available estimates, has fewer than twenty employees. No outside analyst has access yet to cohorts, retention curves or GMV breakdowns.
The cap table as a product stack
The seed line-up does not match a typical consumer commerce round. Kris Jenner brought the Kardashian-Jenner orbit. Sara Blakely brought her founder position at Spanx and her business network. Sheryl Sandberg brought her Lean In network and publishing channels. Hailey Bieber brought the audience around Rhode beauty. Instead of paid CAC, Phia bought distribution with equity.
The January Series A brought a different type of investor. Notable Capital has Airbnb, Anthropic and TikTok in its portfolio, and Hans Tung has 13 entries on the Forbes Midas List. According to the Khosla Ventures press release, Keith Rabois joined, and Kleiner Perkins came back through Annie Case. Tung described the category briefly in the press release: “Historically, shopping was built for an internet of pages and filters, not one mediated by agents. Now, AI sits between people and products, and the challenge is no longer access. It is understanding intent, taste, and trust in real time. Phia is building the AI layer for that shift.”
Phia launched the app in April 2025, and in the same month launched the audio show The Burnouts under Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network. According to Sophia Kianni’s own website, after a year the show has 600,000 followers and 200 million views. Guests have included Kris Jenner, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Chelsea Handler and Paris Hilton. Kris Jenner also sits on the seed cap table. The product, the podcast and the fundraise aim at the same audience and run on the same line.
DMs with a $400 offer
Alongside the institutional story, Phia runs one more layer that does not appear in press releases. According to public discussions on social networks, Phoebe Gates personally messages creators via DM with an offer of around $400 for a single short-form post. Creators typically want around $4,000. Phia offers a tenth of the usual rate, with a performance-based link and personal contact from the founder.
Some creators accept the offer, while others publicly reject it, pointing to the Gates family’s advantages. At a 5% response rate, the economics beat classic influencer marketing.
The debate has been going on since autumn 2025. Cultured Magazine described the founders in April 2026 as “personal shoppers for the AI age”. That framing rests on the same insight. Shopping is now mediated by agents, and whoever owns the agents owns the distribution.
The privilege debate Phia cannot close
In February 2026, Fortune ran a standalone feature on Phia, because the cap table got more attention than the product. Phoebe Gates is the daughter of Bill and Melinda French Gates. In the same piece she responds to an investor’s question, “what happens when you two go have babies”, and describes how her parents do not fund Phia.
Fortune frames the conflict precisely. Phoebe tells reporters that she wants to succeed “with no ties to my privilege or my last name”. In the same interview she says she has a “chip on my shoulder”, and in another interview with Yahoo Finance she calls herself a “nepo baby”. In the same interview, however, she confirms that her surname opens doors to a cap table that no other twentysomething with a $30 million Series A could get.
Sophia Kianni stands on the opposite side of the dynamic. An Iranian-American immigrant family, and a UN adviser at eighteen instead of a trust fund. When Phia stands on the shared platform of these two biographies, it is, in marketing terms, indestructible. No journalist can write about Phia without that juxtaposition. No investor can ignore that specific combination of reach.
What lies ahead for Phia
For its $35 million, Notable Capital is betting that this duo can do the same thing today at ten times the scale. Time Best Inventions, Forbes 30 Under 30 and Time100 Next remain marketing trophies with no link to operating performance.
Brands and investors will want to see repeat purchase rate, GMV per user and a take rate that does not rest on the cap table. Phia has 12 to 18 months to deliver them. A Series B will no longer assess the founders’ origin story or their audience reach, only compare the numbers with benchmarks from affiliate platforms.
The same two million followers that bring users into the app also carry the cap table and the price of the next valuation.
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