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.
One topic kept emerging over and over: clothes, both the ones scattered about their dorm room and what they were looking to buy. Both avid secondhand shoppers, Kianni and Gates realized they did a lot of research before buying anything—and that they weren’t alone.
“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.”
The idea took a minute to take off. They were rejected from one entrepreneurship class, then accepted into another, attracting some early pre-seed funding from Soma Capital and a Stanford professor who liked their pitch. The pitch was an early iteration of what they’re doing now: In 2023, Gates and Kianni moved to New York to start Phia, an AI-driven shopping agent. Phia—an app and mobile browser extension—launched in April 2025, and has since reached 500,000 users and more than 5,000 direct brand partners. (Kianni and Gates also have their own podcast, The Burnouts, via Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, launched in April.)
