- Phia, the AI shopping app TFN covered when it raised $35.5M in January, has now revealed the full angel cohort behind its oversubscribed Series A, a roster of over 30 cultural figures including Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, and Khloé Kardashian.
- The celebrity investor list is not a vanity exercise, it is a distribution strategy, turning cultural tastemakers into advocates for a platform built around personal taste and shopping discovery.
- In the year since launch, Phia has grown to 1.5 million users, nearly 10,000 retail brand partners, and generated over one billion views across its platforms.
When TFN first covered Phia’s $35.5 million Series A in January, the lead investors were the story: Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and returning backer Kleiner Perkins. Now co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni have revealed who else wrote cheques and the list reframes the round entirely.
The Series A angel cohort, announced on CBS Mornings on May 29, includes Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Khloé Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Mindy Kaling, Alix Earle, Karlie Kloss, Alexandre Arnault, Halsey, Ice Spice, Ashley Graham, Bobbi Brown, Rachel Zoe, Leila Hormozi, and Winnie Harlow, among more than 30 others spanning fashion, music, film, and sport. On the operator side, backers include Vlad Tenev of Robinhood, Naomi Gleit of Meta, Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments, Charles Porch of OpenAI, and Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs.
Why the cap table is the product
As TFN documented when Phia first emerged from its Stanford dorm room origins, Gates and Kianni built the company around a specific thesis: shopping discovery is fundamentally social and taste-driven, not algorithmic. The celebrity investor list is the commercial expression of that thesis. Each name on the cap table is a potential content creator, brand relationship, and audience gateway.
“For us, it was about bringing those people and getting them around the table to build what we’re doing with the future of shopping,” Gates said on CBS Mornings.
The numbers since January
Since the round closed, Phia’s growth metrics have continued moving. The platform now counts 1.5 million users and has expanded to nearly 10,000 retail brand partners spanning contemporary, resale, and luxury. The company says it has generated more than one billion views across platforms and built a social community of 2.7 million followers. It is on pace for nine-figure sales growth in 2026.
The platform scans more than 350 million products in real time and attributes a 50% reduction in return rates to its recommendation model. Kleiner Perkins led Phia’s $8 million seed round in September 2025, with participation from Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, and Sheryl Sandberg, bringing total funding to $43.5 million.
The market and the question ahead
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global AI in retail market stood at $31.12 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $164.74 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 32%.
The real test for Phia is whether a cap table full of cultural influence translates into the kind of sustained, organic user growth that keeps a shopping platform relevant beyond the initial wave of celebrity endorsement. The company has a year of strong data behind it. The next year will show whether the audience follows the investors.
