Bill Gates’ youngest daughter has clinched a blockbuster new funding round — vaulting her AI-driven shopping startup into one of the most closely watched ventures in tech’s hottest category.
Phoebe Gates is raising $30 million for Phia, the AI shopping agent she cofounded with Stanford classmate Sophia Kianni, according to a pitch deck viewed by Bloomberg.
A company spokesperson confirmed the round, which will value the New York–based startup at $180 million — a rapid jump just months after Phia closed its first $8 million seed raise in September.
The 23-year-old daughter of Bill and Melinda French Gates, who previously fessed to harboring anxiety about her “nepo baby” status, has built Phia into a magnet for celebrity and Silicon Valley capital.
The deck shows backers including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sheryl Sandberg and Spanx founder Sara Blakely — a rarified roster for any startup, especially one that’s less than a year old.
Bill Gates has not invested, his daughter told Vogue, though the billionaire Microsoft co-founder has publicly supported the company’s mission .
The new round will be led by Notable Capital under managing partner Hans Tung, whose investment history includes Anthropic and Airbnb.
Kleiner Perkins will also participate, along with Khosla Ventures under partner Keith Rabois, according to the pitch deck cited by Bloomberg.
Phia is pitching itself as the AI answer to what it calls the chaos of online shopping — a market where consumers lose time hunting for deals while brands fire ads at the wrong people.
The company is building an AI-powered search engine that plugs into Chrome on desktop and Safari on mobile.
Users can search for products, compare prices and track real-time discounts across retailers and resale platforms.
Phia says the tool has been downloaded 750,000 times in the eight months through November.
Gates and Kianni began working on the idea in their Stanford dorm room, they told Vogue, starting with a concept for a smart tampon before pivoting to fashion tech — a shift that ultimately led to their AI shopping engine.
The founders are surfing a wave of investor mania for so-called AI agents — software that performs repetitive digital tasks automatically and at scale.
Phia’s deck compares the company to Harvey in legal tech, valued at $8 billion; Mercor in HR, which has a $10 billion valuation; and $30 billion Cursor, which develops software development.
For Phoebe Gates, the daughter of one of the world’s most famous billionaires, Phia marks a high-stakes, public test of her own entrepreneurial chops.
The startup’s momentum follows a three-year sprint through Stanford, where she earned a human biology degree in 2024 and deepened her focus on women’s health and global equity.
The Post has sought comment from Phia.
Phoebe is the youngest of three children to Bill and Melinda Gates, who married in 1994 after meeting at Microsoft. The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage.
The relationship unraveled in the years after Melinda raised concerns about Bill’s meetings with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Bill Gates later called his interactions with Epstein a “mistake that I deeply regret.”
As a result of their split, Melinda Gates quit the Gates Foundation in May of last year and received $12.5 billion for her own separate philanthropic work.
Bill Gates has repeatedly said he will leave his children only a small portion of his wealth — “less than 1%” — arguing that handing down a vast inheritance would not be a “favor” to them.
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