A Bloomberg investigation published last month claimed that Phia, a shopping startup co-founded by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni, had been engaging in a shady online practice. The report alleged that the startup’s web extension, which purports to find cheaper deals and discount codes for online shoppers, had been falsely claiming sales it did not actually drive via a practice called cookie stuffing, which violates digital platforms’ policies. The startup makes money by collecting a commission from retailers for every sale that it facilitates, which it verifies by dropping a cookie on the shopper’s browser every time a purchase intentionally involves their extension. Independent testing by Bloomberg, researcher Ben Edelman, and rival company Capital One Shopping claims to have found that Phia’s app secretly opens a background tab to inject its own affiliate code, overriding other referrals to get the commission. Similar accusations also befell PayPal-owned Honey back in 2024, leading to a class-action lawsuit.
On July 8th, Phia representatives characterized the incident as a software bug and told Bloomberg that the team had just been made aware of the issue and that it was immediately resolved “within the last 24 hours.” But now, a new investigation by Bloomberg alleges that Phia executives, and specifically Phoebe Gates, were not just well aware of the situation at least seven months before the publication of the report, but also allegedly actively pushed for the inclusion of the features.
