Phoebe Gates doesn’t lack for name recognition. Being Bill’s kid helps, obviously.
But reputation is a strange beast.
At twenty-three, she launched Phia. An AI shopping startup. Co-founded with Sophia Kianni back in 2025. It sounds like the kind of thing venture capital loves. Simple premise: save shoppers money.
Here is how it was supposed to work. You install the browser extension. It scans thousands of sites for the lowest price. You buy it. Phia gets a commission. Everyone wins, supposedly.
The investor list looks like a celebrity directory. Karlie Kloss, Kim Kardashian, Sydney Sweeney, Hailey Bieber. Tech money is there too. Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins.
$185 million valuation.
$43.5 million raised.
Numbers like that make people look away.
Then came Bloomberg.
They reported cookie stuffing. A technical term for a sleight of hand that feels less like innovation and more like theft.
Here’s the dirty secret. While you’re buying something, the extension opens a tab in the background. It overrides other affiliate codes. It inserts its own. Even if the user never used Phia to find that item, the tool claims credit.
Does that sound familiar? It’s digital theft. Or at least aggressive freeloading.
TechCrunch put it bluntly: Phia took credit for sales it didn’t earn. It didn’t cause the purchase, yet it took the cut.
An independent researcher found this. Capital One looked at it. The math suddenly stops working.
If you can fake the referrals, the revenue is fiction. None of it is real.
The fix was fast, of course. Overnight, apparently.
A spokesperson told Bloomberg they were aware within 24 hours of a recent update. The code was causing misattributions. They claimed compliance. They claim to be audited. The team fixed the hole in the bucket.
It’s over, they say.
The money is raised. The stars are on the payroll. The valuation holds its weight.
But the image stays. The one of a browser extension hiding in the dark, tagging every purchase as its own just to survive.
