Bill Gates’ youngest daughter has secured a massive new funding round — instantly catapulting her AI shopping startup into one of the most talked-about players in tech’s hottest arena.
Phoebe Gates is raising $30 million for Phia, the AI-powered shopping assistant she cofounded with Stanford classmate Sophia Kianni, according to a pitch deck viewed by Bloomberg.
A spokesperson confirmed the round, which will value the New York–based company at $180 million — a staggering leap just months after Phia closed its initial $8 million seed round in September.
The 23-year-old, who has spoken openly about her worries over being labeled a “nepo baby,” has nevertheless turned Phia into a magnet for A-list investors.
The deck lists backers such as Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sheryl Sandberg, and Spanx founder Sara Blakely — an exceptionally star-studded lineup for a startup barely a year old.
Bill Gates himself has not invested, his daughter told Vogue, although the Microsoft co-founder has publicly praised the company’s mission.
The new funding will be led by Notable Capital, headed by Hans Tung — known for big bets on Anthropic and Airbnb. Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, via partner Keith Rabois, are also joining the round, Bloomberg reports.
Phia’s pitch is bold: it wants to solve what it calls the “chaos” of online shopping.
With countless ads and endless tabs, shoppers waste hours searching for deals while brands struggle to reach the right customers.
To fix this, Phia is building an AI-driven search engine integrated directly into Chrome on desktop and Safari on mobile. Users can discover products, compare prices, and track live discounts across both retail and resale platforms.
The tool has already been downloaded 750,000 times in the eight months leading up to November.
Gates and Kianni began brainstorming the concept in their Stanford dorm room — originally starting with an idea for a smart tampon before pivoting to fashion tech. That shift eventually evolved into their AI shopping engine.
They’re now riding the surging investor frenzy around “AI agents” — software tools designed to take over repetitive digital tasks at scale.
Phia’s deck compares the company’s potential to legal-tech giant Harvey (valued at $8 billion), HR firm Mercor ($10 billion), and Cursor, the AI development tool currently valued at $30 billion.
For Phoebe Gates — daughter of one of the world’s most high-profile billionaires — Phia represents a very public test of her own entrepreneurial skill. Its rapid rise follows her accelerated three-year journey through Stanford, where she graduated with a degree in human biology in 2024 and sharpened her interest in women’s health and global equity.
The Post has reached out to Phia for comment.
Phoebe is the youngest of Bill and Melinda Gates’ three children. The couple married in 1994 after meeting at Microsoft and divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage — a split that followed Melinda’s concerns over Bill’s association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Bill Gates later called his interactions with Epstein “a mistake that I deeply regret.”
Following the divorce, Melinda Gates left the Gates Foundation in May last year, receiving $12.5 billion to launch her own philanthropic efforts.
Bill Gates, meanwhile, has long said he plans to leave his children only a small fraction of his fortune — “less than 1%” — arguing that a massive inheritance would not be doing them any favors.
