Phia did not start in a boardroom or a pitch deck factory. It started in a Stanford dorm room where Phoebe Adele Gates and Sophia Kianni were doing what millions of consumers do every night, hopping...
Phia did not start in a boardroom or a pitch deck factory. It started in a Stanford dorm room where Phoebe Adele Gates and Sophia Kianni were doing what millions of consumers do every night, hopping tabs, cross checking prices, chasing the same jacket across retail and resale sites like it owed them money. A class project in 2023 turned into a quiet obsession. By April 5, 2025, that obsession was live, headquartered in New York City, running as an iOS app and browser extension, and staring straight at the inefficiency baked into modern shopping.
The idea was simple but sharp. Shopping is noisy, fragmented, and expensive in time and trust. Phia sits in the middle, an AI shopping assistant indexing billions of products across more than 40,000 retail and resale sites, pulling price intelligence, fit signals, resale value, and sustainability math into a single moment of clarity. It does not shout deals. It shows receipts. It tells you if a price is fair, inflated, or laughable, then quietly offers a smarter option.
That clarity is now backed by serious capital. Phia just closed a $35 million Series A at a $185 million valuation, led by Hans Tung of Notable Capital, with Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures joining the round and Annie Case at Kleiner Perkins returning after leading the $8 million seed just months earlier. The speed matters. Four months from seed to Series A is not hype velocity. It is signal.
The traction underneath is loud without being sloppy. Over one million active users. Eleven times revenue growth since launch. More than 6,200 brand partners seeing thirteen percent higher conversion, thirty percent stronger customer acquisition, fifteen percent higher AOV, and return rates cut in half. Phia indexes hundreds of millions of new products daily, including over 300 million secondhand items, turning resale from an ethical afterthought into a first class option.
Phoebe Adele Gates brings cultural gravity and founder led distribution with more than two million followers and a voice Gen Z actually listens to. Sophia Kianni brings climate credibility earned the hard way through Climate Cardinals and global policy work. Together, they built something that makes sustainability practical instead of preachy and commerce efficient instead of predatory.
This Series A is not about buying growth. It is about deepening the intelligence layer, hiring elite machine learning talent, and pushing Phia further from comparison tool to true shopping agent. Commerce has been running on the same interface for decades. Phia is not trying to decorate it. Phia is trying to understand it, align it, and quietly make every purchase feel less like a gamble and more like a decision worth standing behind.