Bloomberg says Phia founders pushed affiliate features that could claim unearned sales credit

Why it matters

Phia asks merchants and investors to trust that it drives incremental purchases. Bloomberg's report of alleged founder involvement, combined with transaction and commission totals that remain unquantified, puts the measurement behind Phia's affiliate revenue and sales claims under scrutiny.

Bloomberg reported on August 11 that internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter showed Phia co-founders Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni pushed for features that took affiliate credit for sales Phia did not drive. The report newly places the disputed product direction with the founders of the fashion-shopping startup. Earlier reporting in July documented the extension's behavior, which Phia characterized as a software issue that had been fixed.

Gates and Kianni met as Stanford roommates before building Phia, a fashion shopping app and browser extension. They moved Phia to New York in 2023 and launched the public app in April 2025. Gates studied human biology and had worked in fashion and media. Kianni studied Science, Technology, and Society and previously founded Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit that translates climate information for international audiences. Stanford's profile of Kianni describes her as the youngest person to serve as a United Nations adviser.

Their original product was a browser extension that surfaced secondhand alternatives to items shoppers were viewing. Phia's extension compares fashion products and prices across retailers.

TechCrunch reported that Phia collects commissions on purchases made through its platform under affiliate-marketing arrangements. Those arrangements depend on a retailer determining which publisher or service referred a customer. Bloomberg's reporting concerns how Phia established that referral and whether its software inserted Phia into purchases already underway.

Bloomberg ties the behavior to founder direction

Bloomberg first reported on July 9 that Phia's software could generate a visit to a retailer in a separate browser tab during checkout and attach Phia's affiliate information to the transaction. According to Bloomberg, that process could assign Phia the referral even when a shopper had reached the retailer independently or through another publisher.

The available Bloomberg report does not identify the exact feature requests Gates and Kianni allegedly made or specify which founder requested a particular implementation. Bloomberg's August 11 report says internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter showed that both founders pushed for the disputed attribution features and knew about the practice for at least seven months, dating to December 2025.

Phia previously characterized the behavior as a software issue and said it had been fixed. TechCrunch reported that Bloomberg tested the software again after Phia made changes and found that the behavior had stopped.

Phia's affiliate relationships were already under pressure. TechCrunch reported that Impact.com suspended Phia after the July reporting. Bloomberg's August 11 report does not quantify the transactions, commissions or other financial effects at issue.

The supplied reporting does not establish how much Phia earned from transactions attributed through the disputed behavior. It also does not establish whether Phia retained commissions from those transactions or whether merchants and other publishers were reimbursed. Those gaps limit any conclusion about the financial benefit to Phia.

The sales metric at the center of Phia's pitch

Phia reported more than 1 million users and more than 6,200 brand partners by January 2026, according to TechCrunch's report on the company's Series A. Those are company-reported figures, and the available reporting does not independently verify them or establish how much incremental revenue Phia generated.

Attribution rules determine which affiliate receives a commission. A click, referral or other approved interaction is typically used to assign credit. Software that invokes an affiliate link near checkout can produce a high conversion rate because the customer is already close to purchasing. The merchant may then pay a commission without evidence that the affiliate introduced the customer or influenced the decision.

The issue carries greater weight as shopping software moves from recommendations into coupons, checkout and transaction tracking. Larger financial-technology companies bring substantial merchant reach to shopping search: Klarna says its product covers more than 100 million products and 400 million merchant listings. For Phia, claims of incremental purchases can help persuade merchants that its commissions pay for new demand. Bloomberg's report puts the measurement behind that pitch under scrutiny.

Fast funding raised the stakes

Phia announced an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins in September 2025. Individual investors included Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin and Sheryl Sandberg, according to Fortune's funding report.

In January 2026, Phia raised a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital, with Khosla Ventures and returning investor Kleiner Perkins participating. Forbes reported a $185 million valuation for the round, bringing Phia's total disclosed funding to approximately $43 million.

The founders said in January that the financing would help recruit machine-learning engineers and turn Phia into an end-to-end shopping agent. Gates described a product that shoppers would visit at the beginning of a purchase journey, while Kianni argued that AI could reduce the manual work of finding an item. Evidence that Phia influences discovery before checkout is central to that plan and to its case for receiving a commission.

Gates and Kianni have marketed Phia through their own profiles, podcast appearances and public events. Bloomberg's internal-message reporting now puts their alleged product direction at the center of the attribution dispute.

Fixing the automatic referral behavior addressed the software Bloomberg tested in July. The remaining accounting questions concern how many purchases were affected, whether Phia collected commissions from them and whether another affiliate lost credit. Neither Bloomberg's accessible August 11 report nor the other supplied reporting quantifies those categories.

Merchants evaluating Phia therefore have to separate Phia's self-reported sales totals from independently verified incremental revenue. A substantive explanation from Gates and Kianni would need to address the attribution features Bloomberg reported they pushed for and the transactions produced by those features if Phia wants its growth claims to withstand scrutiny.