Press Release
Press Release
Press Contacts: Erik Cummins, Matt Hyams, Taina Rosa, Olivia Meyer
02.10.26
A team of Pillsbury lawyers led by Emerging Companies & Venture Capital partner Ron Fleming, counsel Taylor O’Toole and associate Sarah Konnerth advised AI-powered shopping agent Phia in its $35 million Series A funding round.
Phia, launched by co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni in April of 2025, is an AI-powered shopping agent embedded directly within consumers’ natural shopping flow, providing real-time insights and personalized recommendations to help users make smarter purchase decisions.
Under the hood, Phia is building high-performance machine learning (ML) infrastructure to surface precise product recommendations that have already reduced search latency by 80% and increased monetized gross merchandise value by 40%. This funding will accelerate Phia’s core AI capabilities which power a personalized shopping agent that ingests billions of new products and processes millions of searches daily.
The round was led by Hans Tung from Notable Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures and returning investor Kleiner Perkins.
With more than one million downloads, Phia’s shopping agent translates real-time consumer intent into personalized discovery, powered by product intelligence from a network of 6,200 brands.
The funding will also support continued product development and the expansion of Phia’s AI/ML team.
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