Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, is raising $30 million in new funding for her artificial intelligence shopping startup, Phia, according to a pitch deck viewed by Bloomberg. A company spokesperson confirmed the fundraising effort, which will value the New York-based firm at roughly $180 million. The new round comes only months after Phia closed its initial $8 million raise in September, marking a swift rise for a company less than a year out of its first funding milestone.
Phia was cofounded by Gates and environmental advocate Sophia Kianni, and has quickly attracted high-profile supporters from the worlds of business, entertainment and tech. Among its early backers are Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Spanx founder Sara Blakely. Phoebe Gates told Vogue that her father has not invested directly but has expressed public support for the venture, which began as a student project in their Stanford dorm room.
The new round will be led by Notable Capital under managing partner Hans Tung, whose previous investments include Anthropic and Airbnb. Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, the latter represented by partner Keith Rabois, are also participating. Their involvement reflects the broader surge in valuations for AI agent startups, a sector that has attracted attention as companies race to automate time-consuming digital tasks and streamline consumer behavior.
Phia’s core pitch is that online shopping is fundamentally inefficient. Customers spend excessive amounts of time hunting for deals or locating specific items, while brands often misallocate marketing toward the wrong buyers. Phia’s solution is an AI search engine that helps users find products more efficiently, compare prices and identify discounts. The tool is available as both a mobile app and as extensions for Chrome desktop and Safari mobile, and has been downloaded 750,000 times in the eight months leading up to November, according to the company.
In its pitch materials, Phia compared itself with some of the fastest-growing AI agent companies. Harvey, which focuses on legal services, now carries an $8 billion valuation, while HR platform Mercor is valued at $10 billion and software development agent Cursor has reportedly reached $29.3 billion. These comparisons reflect the current market enthusiasm for AI-enabled automation and Phia’s ambition to occupy a similar high-growth trajectory within consumer retail.
Gates and Kianni told Vogue that the company began with a very different concept: a Bluetooth-enabled tampon. After abandoning that idea, they pivoted toward fashion and retail, identifying online shopping as an area with clear inefficiencies and immediate mass-market demand. Their rapid fundraising success, documented in materials seen by Bloomberg, suggests that investors believe they may have found the right niche at the right moment in the AI boom.
