Bill Gates has mastered the art of dad dressing but his daughter, Phoebe, wants to play it cool. She and her friend from Stanford, Sophia Kianni, have launched a free app that wants to be your shopping buddy. And it has become all the rage among the youth. Phia, their app, is a shopping tool that uses AI to find the best prices on fashion. Now, ain’t that cool when you are looking at the latest collections from Europe or the US?
The mobile app and browser extension can be considered the “Google flights for fashion”. Investors and consumers love what they are doing. Phia, which launched in April, already has around 500,000 users.
In early September, the duo announced an $8 million seed round that took only three-and-a-half weeks to raise. It was led by Kleiner Perkins, with other investors including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
The 23-year-old duo know what they are doing — making shopping for things you love not so expensive. The AI-powered tool compares prices across 40,000-plus retail and secondhand sites in seconds. There are no ads and no endless searching.
Phoebe is the youngest child of Bill and Melinda French Gates while Sophia became her friend and roommate at Stanford University. Gates told The New York Times: “We’re roommates fighting about clothing. We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us.” Phoebe is named after the character from The Catcher in the Rye and she grew up in Seattle, the youngest of three. Her older sister is a pediatric resident while her brother works for a Congressional committee.
She leads a simple life — as simple as possible for a multi-billionaire’s daughter — in a two-bedroom apartment with two cats, an open-plan living-dining-kitchen area, and a walk-in closet. Sophia changed the way she shopped. Soon, she was shopping on Real Real and now she buys most of her clothes via resale. According to a report, every Sunday, she creates her looks for the week and hangs them on a clothing rail. Her favourite colour is pink.
Instead of asking her father for funds, she took her mother’s advice and raised the capital on their own. They started with $100,000 from Soma Capital and a Stanford grant of $250,000 from a social entrepreneurship programme. Then they secured venture backing, including another $500,000 from angel investors. Phia now has a few full-time engineers, as well as an operations manager and a designer who is in her last year at Rutgers University. All the employees have equity.
