SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Phia, a shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, took credit for online sales it did not actually generate, according to a Bloomberg investigation published Thursday.
Phia, launched in April 2025 by Gates and her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni, markets itself as an AI-powered “personal shopping assistant” that operates as a browser extension and mobile app, comparing prices across new, resale and luxury retail sites and calculating resale value for items before purchase. Like many similar shopping tools, Phia operates on an affiliate marketing model, collecting a commission from retailers when its referral leads to a completed sale.
Testing conducted separately by Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping and independent researcher Ben Edelman found that Phia injected its own tracking codes into retailer websites, overriding legitimate referral codes from other publishers that had actually directed the shopper to the site. The practice, sometimes called cookie stuffing or attribution fraud, allowed Phia to claim commissions on purchases it did not influence, redirecting revenue away from the publishers who generated the original traffic. A Phia spokesperson acknowledged the practice to Bloomberg and said it has since been corrected.
The affiliate fraud finding follows an earlier privacy controversy involving the company. In November 2025, Fortune reported that cybersecurity researchers found Phia’s browser extension was transmitting snapshots of virtually every web page a user visited — including sites with highly sensitive information such as bank statements and private emails — back to the company’s servers, even when users were not actively using the shopping tool. Maahir Sharma, a former Meta software engineer who first flagged the issue, said he noticed the extension sending data while he was checking his email, unrelated to any shopping activity.
Phia has grown rapidly since its launch. The company said in June it had reached 1.5 million users and nearly 10,000 retail brand partnerships, scanning more than 350 million products and generating more than a billion views across social platforms. It has raised a total of $43.5 million, including an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins in September 2025 and a $35.5 million Series A round announced in January that valued the company at roughly $185 million. The Series A drew a roster of celebrity investors including Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Khloé Kardashian, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jessica Alba, Mindy Kaling, Karlie Kloss, Halsey and Ice Spice, alongside tech industry backers such as Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev and Meta’s Naomi Gleit. The company was also named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.
Gates, 23, has said she has deliberately avoided taking investment from her parents and has sought to build Phia’s reputation independent of the Gates name. “I have a chip on my shoulder,” she told Yahoo Finance in February, describing her drive to succeed in venture capital on merit rather than family connections.
