Phia Raises $35M to Build AI-Powered Shopping Agent After 11x Revenue Surge

New updates have been reported about Phia.

Phia has accelerated its push to remake online shopping with a new $35 million funding round, just ten months after launch and weeks after closing an earlier $8 million raise. The latest round is led by Notable Capital with participation from Khosla Ventures and existing backer Kleiner Perkins, following an earlier seed backed by high-profile individual investors. The capital will be used primarily to recruit top-tier machine learning engineers as Phia seeks to evolve from a discount-finding tool into a full-scale AI shopping agent. Co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, the New York–based company operates a mobile app and browser extension that surface resale and lower-cost alternatives to items consumers are about to purchase, monetizing via an affiliate-like revenue share when partner brands complete sales on the platform. The model has delivered rapid traction: Phia reports hundreds of thousands of monthly active users, 11x revenue growth since launch, and 6,200 onboarded retail partners, with internal data suggesting it can lift partners’ average order value by 15%, improve new customer acquisition by 30%, and reduce return rates by 50%.

Strategically, Phia aims to become a “holistic shopping agent” that sits at the top of the consumer commerce funnel, giving users a personalized feed, outfit recommendations based on what is already in their closets, and guidance on what to donate or resell. This vision depends heavily on user data, and the company recently faced scrutiny after cybersecurity researchers identified a browser-extension feature that could capture webpage HTML from visited sites. Phia disabled the feature when alerted and stated that it never stored that content and had used it only to determine whether a site was a shopping destination. Management emphasizes that data used to power its AI is aggregated, anonymized, and governed by clear permission disclosures aimed at maintaining user trust. With roughly twenty employees today, the company is prioritizing talent quality over headcount as it positions itself for a broader shift away from static, non-personalized e-commerce toward AI agents that compress manual search and comparison into a streamlined path to purchase. For executives and investors, the key questions now center on Phia’s ability to scale responsibly, deepen retailer relationships, and convert its early Gen Z–driven traction into durable, mainstream adoption in a market where AI personalization and second-hand commerce are both gaining structural momentum.