Phoebe Gates, the 23-year-old daughter of tech legends Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, is making a name for herself in Silicon Valley that has nothing to do with her inheritance.
As the co-founder and co-CEO of Phia, an AI-powered shopping assistant, she is attempting to pull the digital retail experience into the modern era. Alongside her Stanford University roommate and co-founder, Sophia Kianni, Gates is building a tool that acts less like a search engine and more like a high-end personal shopper that lives in your web browser.
The concept for Phia was born in a dorm room, where the two roommates spent hours digging through resale sites like Depop and Poshmark. Gates described the current state of digital commerce as “archaic” during an interview on the Yahoo Finance Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast.
She noted that the experience hasn’t kept pace with the technology driving other sectors. “The reality is online shopping just hasn’t adapted in 30 years,” Gates told Yahoo Finance, arguing that two people with different styles and sizes shouldn’t have the same generic experience when visiting a retailer’s website.
Building on merit, not money
Despite her massive platform, Gates is adamant about distancing her business success from her family’s shadow.
She has intentionally kept her last name out of pitch decks and hasn’t taken a dime of startup capital from her parents. Instead, she is competing for venture capital in the open market, recently securing $35 million in a funding round led by Notable Capital.
This latest injection of cash, backed by Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, has pushed Phia’s valuation to approximately $185 million, less than a year after its official launch.
The drive to succeed independently is a recurring theme for the young entrepreneur. “I have a chip on my shoulder,” Gates said to Yahoo Finance, explaining that she wants to build something with “no ties to my privilege or my last name.” She noted that her primary motivation is to create something “novel and unique that consumers actually love” rather than focusing on a quick financial exit.
Lessons from the Microsoft playbook
While she is forging her own trail, Gates hasn’t ignored the management lessons she learned while growing up in one of the world’s most prominent tech families. She credits her father with teaching her the value of building a powerhouse team. “From my dad, I’ve really learned that your team is the core of what you’re building,” she told Yahoo Finance. “You can’t do anything without an incredible team.”
That focus on talent is where most of Phia’s capital is going. Gates explained that because the cost of running AI models has dropped significantly, her biggest expense is hiring best-in-class machine learning engineers. The strategy seems to be working; the company reports that it has 11xed its revenue in the ten months since it launched.
Looking ahead, the goal for Phia is to move beyond being a simple browser tool and become a full end-to-end shopping destination. Gates envisions a future where the app knows your closet, your values, and your budget so well that it can curate a “daily drop” of items specifically for you. For Phoebe Gates, the ultimate success isn’t just about the technology; it’s about proving that she can build a “generational” company on her own terms.
“I want to build this for the next 30 plus years of my life,” she said. “My dream is either continuing to have the company be successful for a long time or taking it public.”
Also read: SAP’s Retail Intelligence rollout aims to apply AI to demand and inventory planning inside SAP Business Data Cloud.