Phoebe Gates and Her $185 Million Startup Phia: A Dream of Success Without the Family Name — and a "Cookie Stuffing" Scandal

Bill Gates's youngest daughter, 23-year-old Phoebe Gates, has raised more than $43 million in funding for Phia, her AI-powered shopping app, which is now valued at roughly $185 million. Yet she wants the venture to grow on its own merits, free from any advantages tied to her parents — Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates.

In a February episode of Yahoo Finance's Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast, Phoebe Gates said her business "shouldn't have anything to do with my privilege or my last name." "I'm driven to prove myself purely through my own work, without depending on anyone," she said, describing her determination to win over major Silicon Valley investors on personal merit rather than inheritance or reputation.

The remark came at a moment when her father's ties to Jeffrey Epstein were once again drawing public scrutiny — though Bill Gates's representatives have consistently denied any such ties or the allegations surrounding them. Phoebe Gates herself declined to comment on the matter, but her mother, Melinda French Gates, said earlier this year that her ex-husband "has to answer" for the mentions of him in the Epstein documents — a remark that came just weeks after it emerged that Melinda had received $8 billion for her philanthropic organization Pivotal as part of their divorce settlement. At the same time, Phoebe credited her father's business experience: "I really did learn from my dad that team is the foundation of anything you're building. You can't achieve anything without a great team," she said.

This week, however, Bloomberg reported that Phoebe Gates herself has come under fire. She and her co-founder and former Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni, reportedly attempted to build features into the app that let them collect commissions on sales they had no part in — a practice known as "cookie stuffing," in which fake referral codes are planted in a user's browser cookies to siphon off commissions from other companies' legitimate sales. In July, the company said it had learned of the issue only 24 hours earlier, but Bloomberg's latest investigation, citing people familiar with the matter, found the company had actually known about it for seven months.

In its July investigation, Bloomberg worked with Capital One Shopping and independent researcher Ben Edelman to test the browser extension on more than 50 websites. They found that during checkout, Phia would silently open a hidden background window and insert its own referral code without the user's knowledge, overriding other publishers' legitimate referral links — a practice that violates the rules of most affiliate networks.

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg: "All the features that led to the miscalculations were immediately removed more than a month ago, on July 7. We are reviewing every transaction, have already begun reimbursing brand partners for any transactions where miscalculations were identified, and are hiring a head of compliance to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Phia is an AI-powered shopping assistant founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. It integrates with browsers like Chrome and Safari and compares prices in real time across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites to surface the best deals. "Our target customer is the working young woman. She's great at shopping, but she doesn't want to spend her time on it," Gates told Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" editor Emma Hinchliffe in an April 2025 interview. The New York-based startup launched its app in 2025 and grew rapidly, racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads within its first few months, fueled in part by widespread investor interest in AI "agents" that automate digital tasks. That same year, a $35 million funding round led by Notable Capital, with participation from firms including Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, pushed Phia's valuation to roughly $185 million — up from an $8 million seed round just about a year earlier. True to her firm stance against relying on her family name's privileges, the young entrepreneur has taken no money from her parents to fund Phia.