"Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni turned their Stanford dorm room into a startup lab. It's a time-honored tradition at Stanford, a rite of passage many tech bigwigs have undertaken. Gates and Kianni started as randomly assigned roommates, but soon bonded over their shared love of activism and business. And, like many aspiring Stanford founders before them, they were looking for an idea-pinning up articles in their kitchen, calling potential customers from their floors, and scribbling on a whiteboard."
""We wanted to create something that could do all of our shopping for us," said Kianni. "Do it instantly and effortlessly, rather than all the manual price comparison and tab-opening we were doing on our computers.""
""During the time we were building the MVP [minimum viable product], we ended up going out and-even though it was awful-giving it to about 500 different users," said Gates (who, yes, is the daughter of Bill and Melinda). "The stats we were seeing were incredible, huge repeat purchase rates, retention was huge. Mind you, at the time Phia was not perfect""
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni turned dorm-room collaboration into a startup focused on automating shopping and price comparison for secondhand and retail buyers. They faced early academic rejection but secured pre-seed funding from Soma Capital and a supportive Stanford professor. In 2023 they moved to New York to develop Phia, an AI-driven shopping agent available as an app and browser extension. Phia launched in April 2025, reached 500,000 users and more than 5,000 direct brand partners, and demonstrated strong retention after MVP testing with about 500 users. Gates and Kianni also launched a podcast, The Burnouts.
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