There’s a new buzzy fashion startup in town. Meet Phia, the shopping app founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate-slash co-founder, Sophia Kianni.
Phia searches the web to help users compare the price of fashion items. It’s a mobile app and browser extension that’s essentially “Google flights for fashion,” as the company bills itself.
“As we think about what the future of fashion is going to be like five years ago now, it’s all going to be about making access a lot easier to things that people haven’t had access to before,” Gates told TechCrunch.
The app is one of the many fashion startups to arise in this era of artificial intelligence, seeking to bring more ease to the online e-commerce world.
Investors and consumers are loving this category so far. Even Phia, which just launched in April, said it already has around 500,000 users.
In early September, it also announced an $8 million seed round that, Gates, 23, told us, took only three-and-a-half weeks to raise. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with other investors including Kris Jenner and Hailey Bieber.
Phia has now rolled out a new and improved search on the app that looks across more than 300 million fashion items, Kianni said. The goal is to make the e-commerce shopping experience seamless — a place where customers can see everything they’ve previously bought or searched for, and to find new items that would be of interest.
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Gates and Kianni met two years ago and started working on the app just around a year after they met. The first product they built was a desktop Chrome extension that helped users find second-hand alternatives while they were online shopping. “It was pretty buggy,” Kianni recalled.
User feedback also revealed that most of their peers were shopping on their phones, not on their desktops. Plus …