Phia raises 8 million dollars for AI shopping agent

Phia, the AI-powered shopping platform founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has secured an 8 million dollar seed round led by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The company’s funding round, which also included investments from high-profile figures such as Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner, will be used to accelerate the next phase of development for its AI shopping agent.

Launched in April 2025, Phia’s mobile app and browser extension provides consumers with an AI agent to compare prices, calculate resale value, track price drops and summarise product details in real-time. Since its launch, the platform has reportedly amassed 500,000 users and secured more than 5,000 direct brand partnerships.

In a statement, Phia co-founder Gates noted that shopping is “stuck in the past,” with consumers wasting hours comparing prices and hunting for deals. Phia’s second co-founder Kianni added that the platform was started to make it easy for consumers to find the best price on items, as well as to create a new search engine for shopping that learns from user data at scale.

Phia currently hosts billions of fashion products and ingests hundreds of millions more each day. It also has one of the largest second-hand fashion databases in the US, with over 300 million items indexed.

Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, stated that the firm's due diligence found that Phia was tackling key pain points for both consumers and brands. The platform helps consumers compare prices and discover new brands, while also providing brands with lower acquisition costs and better discoverability.

With its new funding, Phia plans to grow its team across engineering, AI research, product, and marketing. The company is investing in proprietary model development and GPU infrastructure to handle large-scale data and expand its platform into new verticals. Additionally, Phia will build out its consumer brand and partnerships to reach a wider audience.