Phoebe Gates set out to solve a consumer problem she knew well.

What began as a small experiment in her student dorm room has since evolved into a startup that has captured the attention of investors and celebrities alike.

By deliberately keeping her famous parents out of the business, Gates has built a company now valued at one hundred eighty million dollars, with an ambition to change the stark imbalance facing women in the startup world.

At twenty-three, Phoebe Gates, the youngest daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and her Stanford University classmate Sophia Kianni have successfully raised thirty million dollars for the company they co-founded while living in student housing.

The latest funding round values the business at one hundred eighty million dollars.

Neither Bill Gates nor his former wife, Melinda French Gates, participated as investors.

Together, Gates and Kianni created an artificial intelligence-driven second-hand fashion shopping platform called Phia, a name formed by combining parts of their first names.

Phia is now headquartered near Union Square in Manhattan and employs twelve people.

Since its launch in April, the platform has quickly gained traction on social media and drawn interest from high-profile investors, including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta.

The idea emerged while the two founders were experimenting with generative artificial intelligence during a Stanford course that encouraged students to explore practical applications of the technology.

Early on, they even considered developing a gland-based tampon.

Eventually, however, they chose to focus on a challenge they shared with many people their age: the lack of price consistency and transparency across second-hand clothing marketplaces.

Their initial prototype earned them a grant of two hundred fifty thousand dollars from Stanford’s social entrepreneurship program, enabling them to commit to the project full-time and later relocate to New York.

Gates has said that when she first presented the idea to her parents, they advised her to continue her studies and treat the business as a side project.

She followed that guidance, completing her third year of studies in New York through Stanford’s local evening program.

Gates completed her biology degree a year ago and only then shifted her full focus to the startup.

Her father famously took a different path exactly fifty years earlier, leaving Harvard University in nineteen seventy-five to found Microsoft.

Kianni, by contrast, has temporarily paused her degree, saying she wanted to learn as quickly as possible about the industry they were entering.

Phia is available both as a standalone application and as a browser extension and has reached approximately seven hundred fifty thousand downloads within eight months.

The company positions itself as a solution to what it describes as a “broken shopping experience,” in which consumers waste time searching for deals or specific items across multiple platforms.

Its artificial intelligence-powered search engine compares prices across more than one hundred fifty second-hand marketplaces, covering over three hundred fifty million items.

It highlights real-time deals, offers recommendations, and assesses whether an item’s price is fair or inflated.

According to the founders, Phia acts as a personal shopping advisor.

“We tell you, ‘Do not buy this, it is a bad decision,’ or ‘Yes, buy this, the price is reasonable, it has good reviews, and it will hold its value over time,’” they say.

Gates has built a significant online following, with about half a million followers on Instagram and two hundred seventy-one thousand on TikTok.

Together with Kianni, she also co-hosts a popular podcast called The Burnouts, which supports the growing brand.

For Gates, encouraging second-hand shopping is a matter of principle.

“We do not need to buy new clothes,” she says.

“There are enough clothes on this planet for the next six generations. The rise of second-hand fashion is genuinely exciting. We just need to make it easier for consumers”.

She and her partner aim to develop an artificial intelligence shopping assistant that can anticipate users’ needs and deliver personalized recommendations.

“We are building the product we desperately wanted when we were in college and that simply did not exist,” Gates said in an interview with Vogue.

Speaking alongside Kianni at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, she explained that they were the students who spent hours browsing multiple second-hand sites to find the best deal and decide whether an item truly belonged in their wardrobes.

“We felt there was a huge, unmet space when it comes to helping people buy only what they actually need,” she said.

“So much money ends up wasted. We kept asking how to make this accessible to everyone, especially when large companies can overwhelm smaller players with massive advertising budgets”.

Asked whether she relies on advice from her parents, Gates offered a measured response.

“No one will give you better advice than your customers,” she said.

“As brilliant as my father is, he is not the typical Phia shopper. He is not comparing deals across sites or weighing his wish list against the cost of a spring break vacation”.

Looking ahead, Gates hopes the startup will succeed enough to allow her to invest in causes she cares deeply about.

“It is absurd how few women leaders we have,” she told ELLE.

“Only two percent of venture capital funding goes to companies led by women. That is unacceptable. I want to build the world I want to live in. My hope is that Phia succeeds so strongly that I can invest more in women founders, and that this figure rises to twenty percent before I even have a child. That truly motivates me”.