There is a new buzzy fashion start in the city. Meet Phia, the shopping app founded by her daughter Bill Gates Phoebe Gates and co-founder of Stanford Slash-Slash, Sophia Kianni.
Phia is looking for web to help users compare the price of fashion items. It is an application for mobile and expansion of the browser that is essentially “Google Flights for Fashion” as the company itself charges.
“As we think about what the future of fashion will be five years ago now, everything is going to make access much easier to things that people didn’t have access before,” Gates told TechCrunch.
The application is one of the many newly established companies that emerge in this age of artificial intelligence, seeking to bring energies to the e -commerce e -world.
Investors and consumers love this category so far. Even PHIA, which has just begun in April, said it already has about 500,000 users.
In early September, he also announced A round of $ 8m seed This took only three and a half weeks to increase, the 23 -year -old gates said. The round was driven by Kleiner Perkins, with other investors, such as Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
PHIA has now released a new and improved search search that appears in more than 300 million fashion items, Kianni said. The goal is to make the experience of e-commerce markets smoothly-a place where customers can see everything they have purchased or searched before and find new items that will be of interest.
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Gates and Kianni met two years ago and started working in the application just about a year after meeting. The first product they built was an expansion of Chrome desktop that helped users find used alternatives while they were electronic purchases. “It was quite buggy,” Kianni recalled.
Users’ comments have also revealed that most of their peers shop on their phones, not on their desktop computers. In addition, Kianni said, young people are more interested in direct price checks, rather than used comparisons. “We decided to really adjust our focus,” he said.
“We should know it honestly from our own behavior,” Gates added. “The girl who is obsessed shopping and scrolling all the time often does it on her phone, laptop more when she works, but the phone is the key.”
So Gates and Kianni started building a new application.
Kiannia said the first control of Phia came from one of Stanford’s social entrepreneurship programs. As soon as the traction began to grow, Gates and Kianni decided that further execution of their vision required business capital.
They searched top -level funds to fight for their rounds and especially wanted prominent women as investors. But before they can start the hustle and bustle of capital concentration, Soma Capital Cold fell to Kianni on LinkedIn after listening to the product. The business ended up providing one of the first institutional controls.
“From there, they ended up introducing us to a ton of incredible people,” Kianni said. “We ended up both cold projections and then get other people to connect with us.”
Their round is a merger of some of the most buzziest people in business and technology and a conflict of two strong networks.
Kianni herself is a famous activist, having founded the non -profit Cardinals climatewhich translates information about climate change in different languages. He was one of the younger people who ever became the United Nations Advisor and appeared on numerous lists, including 100 BBC women.
In addition to Jenner and Bieber, others in the round include billionaire Michael Rubin, Spanx founder Sara Blakey and Sheryl Sandberg. Soma ended up introducing them to the Kleiner Perkins team, the business that eventually drove this seed round.
“I got my beginning in e -commerce, so I always believed in the power of technology to turn the way people shop on the internet,” Rubin said in a statement to TechCrunch. “What excites me about Phia is how phoebe and wisdom bring true innovation in the field by shopping smarter and using technology to unlock a better experience for everyone.”
So much of Phia’s marketing are also basically Gen Z: it focuses on the organic, public content orientation. She and Gates, for example, are open to experiments running with Phia. They ask people to direct their comments and have used social media to hire talent and source designers. And they Use Chatgpt for help With marketing in the pursuit of viral campaign.
They also receive some help to get attention to their product from the podcast called The Burnouts, which also started in April. Has Nearly half a million Fans on Instagram. Kianni said Podcast helps to channel interest to Phia, as it focuses on the exchange of career advice to young people, especially women. He said he had already garnered 10 million views on various social media platforms.
The podcast has allowed them to “open” how she and Gates build their company, speaking through all the stumbles and obstacles, which in turn help other people who want to start companies in this area, he continued.
“We have received a very digital first approach to everything,” Kianni said. “I think it was part of the reason we’ve seen such a rapid attraction.”
Gates and Kianni said that fresh capital will be used mainly to build the group (there are only 12 people currently) and are of course hired through social media. Overall, the twin sees Phia as the future of personalized markets.
Gates said he hoped even one day to build a personalized agent who can help synchronize with calendars and tell customers when to buy and what, what to resell and what to keep.
“There is a lot more to do, much more we want to learn and grow up,” Kianni added. “We want to be able to do this publicly so that our audience can learn and grow alongside us.”
