The daughter of Bill Gates doesn’t want you to think about her father. That’s why she’s always referred to as the daughter of Bill Gates. And now she has announced she thought of a way to use AI to bully stores into charging her less for fancy clothing.

I wish I was making this up.

I’m not.

Her product, if you can even call digital racketeering that, is a horrible looking margin compression engine. The name “Phia” is a portmanteau of “Phoebe” and “Sophia”. I mention that because she literally embedded her own name into her product while claiming to build something independent of her name.

I’m only getting started.

The Phia injects itself like digital muscle between retailer and consumer, scraping prices across thousands of sites to route buyers to the cheapest option. It’s the kind of thing we’ve seen on the web since 1994. It’s like Sharepoint saying the web is now proprietary and you have to pay. It’s like Internet Explorer saying the web is now proprietary and… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Phia is the opposite of innovation. It’s parasitic intermediation most reminiscent of Leland Stanford himself. Notably, both founders went to Stanford. Their first product idea was a Bluetooth tampon and from there they pivoted to surveillance of retail shoppers.

The Extraction Racket

I’m not an economist but when I went to LSE I learned a thing or two about financial risk models. The Phia theory is retailers will eat the cost of inventory, merchandising, photography, returns infrastructure, and brand building, and then an AI agent will show up to undercut them by redirecting the sale elsewhere. Phia even takes an affiliate commission from the retailer whose sale it just cannibalized. That’s cruel on top of being criminal. The consumer pays with their data. The only people who would get nothing in this transaction are the ones who actually make things. The value capture flows to the “platform” flexing huge “investor” muscle.

Why would anyone who actually makes or sells things sign up? Market capture. It’s the Walmart playbook automated and celebrated as “empowerment.” Well, even that’s being generous. In Somalia this was pushed by billionaire Arab investors into Red Sea traffic and called… piracy.

If the web business model sounds familiar, it should. Phia is structurally identical to PayPal’s disgraced Honey browser extension, which is currently facing over 25 class action lawsuits for replacing creators’ affiliate links with its own at checkout.

Cookie stuffing is fraud.

One of Phia’s early investors, Joanne Bradford, was the former president of Honey. Her legacy is that Google updated Chrome Web Store policies in March 2025 specifically to crack down on extensions claiming affiliate commissions without providing discounts. Somehow, who can guess why, Phia was pushed into launch one month later.

Climate Activism Meets Fast Fashion

Maybe the buried lede is the cofounder Sophia Kianni, whose climate activism credentials seem to exist. She founded Climate Cardinals and served on the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on climate change. However, Phia’s retail partners include Abercrombie alongside secondhand platforms, and the tool actively redirects consumers to cheaper new items from discount brands, not just resale. Routing people to the cheapest fast fashion option is a strange expression of environmental values. It’s maybe like everything else in this story, a huge disappointment in the standards of education at Stanford.

The entire “shops like a genius” framing by Phia is an insult to the English language. Shopping “like a genius” apparently means paying the least possible while someone else absorbs all the risk and cost. That’s a race to the bottom dressed up in girl-boss language. It’s like saying “cooks like a top chef” for someone who ordered a pizza delivered.

Why are rich people so obsessed with being lazy yet taking credit for hard work that others do? Pick a lane.

The Name Game

And why doesn’t Gates use a pseudonym, if she wants to escape her name, instead of showing up everywhere as the daughter of the Epstein guy? Every single headline I see says “Bill Gates’ daughter.” The $35 million raise, the $185 million valuation, the Kleiner Perkins and Khosla participation. Need I go on? None of that happens for a 23-year-old Stanford grad with a browser extension if her last name is Mohammed.

Her claimed desire for independence from privilege while trading on it in every single sentence is the kind of cognitive dissonance that works only when nobody has any incentive to point it out. The investors don’t care about her name in the pitch deck; they care about it in the press releases.

She clearly knows how to obscure a connection. Just look at how she allegedly didn’t take money from her parents. She took a $250,000 grant from Stanford’s social entrepreneurship program that is funded by the kind of endowment her parents’ circles built. The celebrity investor list definitely says she’s someone who is “independent”: Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg, Sara Blakely. Kim Kardashian filmed a launch teaser. This is the diametric opposite to bootstrapping. Privilege laundering through one degree of separation is proof she can launder, so why not come up with a stage name?

The Surveillance Product

All that being said, this is really a story about a recent college grad tricking people into giving up their privacy for nothing gained. What are they teaching at Stanford?

The real buried lede is the data collection story from November 2025. Four security researchers reported that Phia’s browser extension contained a hidden function called logCompleteHTMLtoGCS that captured full HTML snapshots of every webpage users visited.

Full. As in FULL.

Banking sites, private emails? Everything. It compressed them, and uploaded them to Phia’s servers. Not just shopping sites. Every page. Security researcher Charlie Eriksen from Aikido Security called it “among some of the crazier things” he’d seen in his career.

Phia removed the feature only after a researcher contacted them. They never disclosed the violation to users. They claimed they “never stored this data.” Then they raised $35 million.

A price comparison tool that watches everything you browse and buy isn’t an assistant. It’s a spy. This is a billionaire-backed surveillance operation under a very thin shopping skin. The phia.com website itself is essentially empty, showing only a title tag and a Facebook tracking pixel. That’s the $185 million celebrity promoted valuation, staring back at you.

Leland Stanford, what a guy.