Bill Gates’ daughter lands $30 million for star-backed AI fashion firm

Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft Corp.’s billionaire founder Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, is raising $30 million in new funding for Phia, a startup applying artificial intelligence to online shopping, according to a pitch deck seen by Bloomberg. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the round.

The capital raise will value the New York-based startup at $180 million and comes just months after Phia completed its first $8 million funding round in September. Phia, which Gates co-founded with Sophia Kianni, is backed by a constellation of celebrities including model and businesswoman Hailey Bieber, Kardashian family matriarch Kris Jenner, former Meta Platforms Inc. chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and Spanx founder Sara Blakely. Bill Gates has not invested, Phoebe Gates told Vogue, but has publicly supported the startup.

The round will be led by venture capital firm Notable Capital, under managing partner Hans Tung, whose earlier investments include Anthropic PBC and Airbnb Inc. Investor Kleiner Perkins is also participating, alongside Khosla Ventures under partner Keith Rabois.

Phia’s pitch for its AI agent is that online shopping is broken and customers waste time looking for deals or particular items, while brands are targeting the wrong consumers. The founders are developing an AI-based search engine, offered as an app and browser extension for Chrome desktop and Safari mobile, to help users find items, compare prices, and spot deals. The tool has been downloaded 750,000 times in the eight months ending in November, according to the company.

Valuations are ballooning for so-called AI agent startups that promise to perform grunt work, saving human workers’ time, or replacing them altogether. In its pitch deck, Phia compared itself to fast-growing agent startups such as Harvey in the legal sector, recently valued at $8 billion; Mercor in HR, valued at $10 billion; and Cursor in software development, valued at $29.3 billion.

Gates and Kianni began working on the company in their Stanford dorm room, they told Vogue, initially coming up with the idea of a Bluetooth tampon before pivoting to fashion.