Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni did not pitch their fashion-search start-up Phia the traditional way. They made content out of the fundraise, assembled a community in public, and let social proof do what decks and cold emails rarely do. The outcome: an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, finalized over a matter of weeks and with a cap table that is a mix of top-tier venture and pop-culture power.
Inside Phia’s creator-led fundraise, built intentionally
Like modern creators, the founders of Phia document experiments and solicit product feedback via DMs; they hire out in the open. Their podcast, The Burnouts, has built up a substantial audience on Instagram and via short-form video, and it’s also become a discovery engine for Phia. In sharing the messy middle around building a company — what worked and successes, what didn’t and failures — they converted attention into real advocacy, then investor momentum.
The strategy fits the product. Phia is a mobile app and browser extension that searches prices across hundreds of millions of fashion items — think Flights-style metasearch for apparel. The crew publishes experiments, invites users to stress-test the results, and it even makes use of AI tools to iterate on campaign ideas. Instead of polished press releases, they ship clips, post questions, and fold in the answers.
How Phia sped through its seed round using social proof
The round came together fast. The first institutional hangup came next, after an early cold LinkedIn message from Soma Capital when the firm learned about what Phia was working on. That set off a series of introductions to heavyweight investors, ultimately leading to Kleiner Perkins and a lineup of high-signal angels including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg, Sara Blakely, and Michael Rubin. Gates and Kianni also set out to reach prominent women partners and operators like women gamers and influencers who shared their user base and mission.
Two networks collided: Kianni’s global climate-advocacy footprint (she was the founder of Climate Cardinals and a youth adviser to the United Nations) and Gates’ builder-investor ecosystem. The cap table, in conjunction with visible traction and a media flywheel, was transformed into a distribution asset, not only a financing event.
Traction that looks like product-market fit
How Phia got traction was very Gen Z. The initial build was a Chrome extension that nudged shoppers toward secondhand alternatives. User feedback spoke the quiet part: people shop on phones and price checks must be instantaneous. The squad pivoted for mobile, intensified search, and zeroed in on speed and relevance.
Today, Phia claims to have about 500,000 users and a search index crawling over 300 million fashion items. The experience is deliberately timid: just compare prices, keep track of what you’ve already seen, and surface better options quickly. That utility — and the founders’ public dialogue with users — brought down customer acquisition costs and made the fund-raising narrative concrete.
Why the Gen Z playbook works for capital
Dissemination through social media first has now become a statement of strength on the balance sheet. Accenture has estimated that social commerce could rise up to a trillion dollars globally within the next few years, spearheaded by Gen Z and millennials. McKinsey and the Business of Fashion have written about how creator-led discovery is remaking apparel and beauty, condensing the distance between awareness and purchase into a single scroll. In that world, founders who are literate in short-form storytelling can actually show demand happening in real time, not just a data room.
There’s a capital-efficiency angle, too. When the cost of acquiring a customer online is expensive and targeting quality deteriorates due to privacy changes, founder-led media becomes CAC arbitrage from community feedback loops. Phia’s converting podcast listens, Instagram followers, and DM feedback into active users was living proof for investors of how to grow cheaply again and again.
What the $8M seed funding is for at Phia
The seed is “primarily going toward headcount,” notably bolstering the startup’s judicious dozen-person team, and will further develop its technology — search in particular — the founders said. On the horizon: a virtual shopping assistant that learns your taste, nudges you when it’s time to buy, and indicates what you should resell versus retain. The goal is a real shopping OS that will remember your taste and make smarter decisions for you.
Execution remains the differentiator. And building in public continues to keep the user feedback loop tight, while investors have full visibility into pace. In consumer software, momentum is the moat; this raise seems tailored toward deepening it.
Practical takeaways for founders raising consumer apps
- Make the fundraise distribution: argue for yourselves where your customers live, not just in partner meetings.
- Develop a focused list of investors that look like your users.
- Combine the institutional credibility with creator reach for post-close amplification.
- Ship on mobile first.
- Use public feedback to murder or double down on ideas with the speed of an executioner, and let the receipts — users, engagement, retention, etc. — do most of the pitching.
Phia’s $8 million didn’t come in the door because of the story; it closed because the story was public, quantifiable, compounding.
That’s the Gen Z method in a nutshell — and, increasingly, one of the fastest paths from idea to funded company.