Phoebe Gates, Bill Gates’ Daughter, Is Making A Name For Herself In Tech

When she pitched her startup to them, her parents responded in unison: “Okay, you can dedicate your free time to it, but you have to continue your studies.” This was surprising coming from Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to launch Microsoft. Even worse, the billionaire hasn’t invested a single penny in his daughter’s company, despite publicly supporting it. This didn’t discourage young Phoebe, a biology student at Stanford. She enrolled in evening classes at her university to pursue her project alongside her studies and graduated in 2024.

A year later, in mid-2025, the youngest of the Gates children launched Phia, an AI-powered app and search engine extension, a kind of Booking.com for fashion that allows users to instantly compare prices across thousands of e-commerce sites for any new or secondhand item. The idea stemmed from frustration: Phoebe Gates saw an Area dress for $150 on a resale platform when she had paid $500 for it—more than three times the price. With her best friend Sophia Kianni, they founded Phia—a combination of their first names. The two Stanford students refined their concept in their dorm room on campus. Their target audience: “smart girls between 25 and 30 who want to get the best price with a single click,” Gates explained to the New York Times. The two young women envision Phia as a personal assistant capable of anticipating consumers’ desires and needs and even providing personalized recommendations. This project has attracted over 40,000 e-commerce sites, as well as numerous investors including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg, formerly of Meta. At the end of January, Phia announced a new funding round of $35 million, valuing the startup at $185 million. 

But Phoebe Gates is adamant about one point: there’s no question of encouraging rampant consumerism. For her, secondhand clothing is the key to the company’s value. “There are enough clothes on this planet for the next six generations,” she explained to Elle magazine. “We don’t need to buy new ones. The rise of secondhand is a very exciting phenomenon. We just need to make it more accessible to consumers.” At the helm of a dozen employees, Gates is above all a committed woman who developed a philanthropic streak from a young age, thanks to her parents’ deep involvement in their foundation. As a child, she accompanied her mother to Ethiopia and Rwanda, and returned there as a volunteer in her teens. “The guiding principle of my work is to democratize access to sustainable consumption, accurate information, and, most importantly, healthcare,” she emphasized to the Financial Times. She has also donated several million dollars to support the reproductive health of women and girls.

Neither a “nepo baby” nor a “daddy’s girl,” Phoebe Gates is determined not to remain in her parents’ shadow. It’s a path fraught with obstacles for a newcomer to the tech world who bears the name of one of the most famous entrepreneurs on the planet—and the eighteenth richest person in the world. “Growing up, I realized that people will always have an opinion about me,” she told the New York Times. “If my company is a success, they’ll say it’s thanks to them.”…