Hailey Bieber’s investment in Phia, the AI shopping startup founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, could help consumers pay less for smarter purchases. Here is what it means for shoppers and the retail industry.
Hailey Bieber is not finished rewriting the rules of consumer culture. Fresh off selling her skincare brand Rhode to e.l.f. Beauty for $1 billion this past spring, she has already turned her attention to a new frontier: helping people spend less and shop smarter. Her latest move is an investment in Phia, an artificial intelligence shopping startup founded by Phoebe Gates and climate activist Sophia Kianni. It is a platform designed to make the endless scroll of online shopping less overwhelming and more cost-effective, and Bieber’s involvement is a signal of where the future of fashion and beauty commerce is headed.
Phia announced its 8 million dollar seed round this week, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, Desiree Gruber, and Sheryl Sandberg. The iOS app and browser extension, launched in April, gives shoppers a digital companion that compares prices in real-time, calculates resale value, summarizes product details, and tracks discounts as they appear. The idea is to take the uncertainty out of buying decisions while introducing consumers to brands they may not have discovered otherwise.
In only five months, the startup has attracted half a million users and secured more than 5,000 brand partnerships, helping to drive tens of millions of dollars in sales. “AI is reshaping nearly every industry, but shopping is stuck in the past,” Gates, Phia’s co-founder and daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, said in a statement. “Consumers still waste hours comparing prices and hunting for deals, only to still end up overpaying.” Kianni, echoed the ambition to build a tool that redefines how we search for products, saying, “We started Phia to make it easy for consumers to find the best price on items they love and to create a new search engine for shopping that learns from user data at scale to deliver personalized results.”
Why AI shopping is the next frontier
Phia comes at a time when younger consumers are embracing artificial intelligence for product research at unprecedented levels. According to a June 2025 survey from Commerce, Gen Z shoppers are nearly as likely to use AI platforms — 33 percent more likely — for researching products as they are traditional search engines.
Millennials are not far behind, with 26 percent choosing AI versus 40 percent who stick with search engines. More telling is the trust factor: almost a quarter of Gen Z respondents reported trusting AI platforms more than people for curated product recommendations. “Agentic commerce is no longer a concept on the horizon, it’s here, and it’s already the first stop in the shopping journey,” said Al Williams, general manager of B2C at Commerce. “Gen Z and millennials now trust AI more than search, social or influencers to guide what they buy. The shift is clear: brands that show up inside AI-driven platforms will be the ones earning relevance and loyalty in this new era.”
Phia is positioning itself at the heart of that shift. The platform already hosts billions of fashion products and claims one of the largest secondhand fashion databases in the United States, with over 300 million items indexed. Its next phase will introduce a personalized shopping agent built on a proprietary large language model trained on millions of real transactions. By developing multimodal agents that process data ten times faster and at half the cost of off-the-shelf GPTs, Phia intends to make shopping advice that feels tailored to each user’s tastes, habits, and budget.
What Hailey Bieber’s backing means
Bieber herself sees more than just a promising technology. “Phoebe and Sophia recognized the white space that existed in the fashion industry and were quick to build a product this generation wants,” she told The Business of Fashion. “They move fast and listen deeply to their customers. Backing female founders with this level of clarity and creativity is something I’m honored to be a part of.” It is a rare combination of credibility and cultural capital: two founders shaping a new type of search engine, paired with an investor who just proved the scale of a celebrity-led brand with Rhode’s blockbuster exit.
For everyday consumers, the appeal is direct. Online shopping has long been defined by frustration — comparing tabs, questioning if a better price is hidden somewhere else, or hesitating over whether a purchase will hold value. Phia promises to eliminate that uncertainty. Its database does not just show the lowest price; it can calculate how much you might earn if you decide to resell a piece, and it integrates both new and secondhand options in one place. It is the kind of frictionless shopping that could shift how we interact with digital marketplaces, reducing wasted time while giving confidence that a purchase is not an impulsive gamble.
Investors see the potential not only in convenience but in cost efficiency for brands. Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in the announcement that “Phia is redefining how people make purchase decisions. During diligence, we saw Phia tackling key pain points: helping consumers compare prices and discover new brands, while giving brands lower acquisition costs, better discoverability, and smarter retargeting.” That combination of consumer value and brand benefit could prove powerful in a retail landscape where both sides are seeking relief from fatigue and inefficiency.
Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics, put it more bluntly: “Phia is perfectly positioned to disrupt E-commerce with AI. It’s a product I believe in, in an industry I care deeply about, and I’m proud to help champion what they’re building.”
For Bieber, it is another opportunity to align her influence with a new consumer need. Rhode proved she could parlay her reach into a serious business with impressive growth and a major acquisition. Phia gives her a chance to back a tool that could change how her generation shops — not with another serum or lipstick, but with the technology that helps people decide whether those items are worth buying in the first place.
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