Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, is following a familiar path to startup success: launching a company out of a college dorm room. Alongside her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianna, the 23-year-old is looking to shake up e-commerce with an A.I.-powered shopping assistant called Phia.
The idea—an app and mobile extension that lets users compare prices across more than 40,000 sites—came from the duo’s own frustration with online shopping. “There felt like there was this giant white space for, what should we actually buy and why doesn’t everyone have a personal shopper in their pocket?” said Gates while speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 yesterday (Oct. 28). “We were wasting so much money on junk.”
What started as a class project soon turned serious after Gates and Kianna received a $250,000 grant from Stanford. Phia officially launched in April this year and quickly caught the attention of major investors. In September, the startup raised $8 million in a seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, attracting a star-studded group of backers that included Sheryl Sandberg, Michael Rubin, Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner.
Like many Gen Z, Gates and Kianna are avid social media users. In addition to documenting their startup journey on TikTok and Instagram, they co-host a podcast, The Burnouts, on Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, where they’ve interviewed guests ranging from Paris Hilton to Tommy Hilfiger.
They also take an unconventional approach to user feedback. “Every other week, we have 40 of our power users come to the office and ‘roast’ the app,” said Gates. A recent session inspired the team to explore adding sizing recommendations—a feature they hope to build by analyzing return data and user measurements.
Phia, which has already gained more than 600,000 users, places a strong emphasis on the secondhand market. The platform integrates with roughly 150 resale sites and includes 350 million secondhand items in its search database, reflecting the founders’ focus on sustainability.
“We have enough clothes right now in existence to dress the next six generations of humans,” said Kianna, who has a background in climate activism and became the youngest United Nations advisor in U.S. history in 2020. “Buying an item secondhand actually represents an 80 percent reduction in carbon footprint compared to buying new, and it’s less than 75 percent of the cost.”
Phia also promotes more mindful shopping through features that remind users of an item’s retained value. Someone considering a $100 fast-fashion piece, for example, can see how quickly it depreciates compared to higher-quality items.
Gates and Kianna plan to roll out more personalized features as Phia learns about customers’ tastes and preferences. By leveraging A.I., Gates said, the startup can “collect that data very, very cheaply to, long term, power personalized recommendations.”
One might assume Gates would turn to her parents for help navigating the startup world, but she says she’s more interested in learning from industry leaders such as Spanx founder Sara Blakely and designer Danielle Guizo—and from Phia’s users themselves.
Despite describing her father a “genius,” Gates pointed out that his expertise isn’t necessarily in fashion. “He’s not comparing his wishlist items for his spring break trip,” she said.