Phoebe Gates wants to start an AI shopping company, but she won’t include her last name in her pitch materials. The 23-year-old youngest daughter of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates has raised more than $43 million for Fear, which is currently valued at about $185 million.
But Phoebe Gates told Yahoo Finance that she was determined to let the business stand on its own, “which has nothing to do with my privilege or my family name.” Unfiltered starting bid amount A podcast of the episode released in February.
“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, speaking of her desire to prove that she can beat Silicon Valley private equity based on merit rather than inheritance or legacy.
Phoebe Gates’ comments come amid a re-emergence of her father’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, although Bill Gates’ representatives have repeatedly denied his involvement and related accusations. Phoebe Gates did not comment on the allegations, but French Gates said earlier this year that her ex-husband “must answer” for references to the Epstein files, just weeks after it was revealed she had received $8 billion from the charity Pivotal as part of her divorce settlement.
Phoebe Gates credited her father’s success in business, saying, “I really learned from my father that your team is the core of what you’re building. You can’t do anything without a great team.”
How Phoebe Gates is carving her own path
Phoebe Gates co-founded the AI shopping assistant Phia with her Stanford roommate Sophia Chianni. Shopping Assistant connects to browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and view deals from tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. This essentially acts as your own personal trading search. For example, let’s say you’re looking for a $200 dress from Anthropologie. Phia searches and compares prices from second-hand retailers to help customers find better prices.
“Our target consumer is a busy, working young woman. She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it,” Gates said. luck‘s Most Powerful Women Editor Emma Hinchliffe, April 2025.
this week, bloomberg Phia’s browser extension was suspected of claiming credit for online sales it did not facilitate, a practice known in affiliate marketing as “cookie stuffing.” According to bloombergWhen we tested the extension on more than 50 websites with Capital One Shopping and independent researcher Ben Edelman, we found that Phia silently opens background tabs during checkout, inserts unique referral codes, and disables legitimate referrals from other site operators in violation of many affiliate networks’ policies.
A FIA spokesperson said: bloomberg The company said it became aware within the past 24 hours that a recent code release was “causing incorrect attribution from some users” and that the issue had been fixed. bloomberg After contacting the company, I retested the extension and found that it had stopped automatically requesting referral clicks.
The New York-based startup launched its app in 2025 and has grown rapidly, garnering hundreds of thousands of downloads in its first few months as investors flock to its AI “agents” that automate digital tasks. A recent $35 million funding round led by Notable Capital, with participation from firms like Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, increased Phia’s valuation to approximately $185 million less than a year after its initial $8 million seed round.
Gates and Chianni first brainstormed the startup idea in their dorm room at Stanford University and toured the concept until they landed on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her mother) and Chianni’s focus on sustainability.
In line with Gates’ insistence on launching his own venture without the benefit of his last name, the young founder received no funding from his parents for Fear. Instead, she insists on raising money from outside, even though some investors are fixated on her personal life rather than her business.
Gates and Kiani said the topic of future children has come up in meetings before, which was understandably frustrating for the two entrepreneurs. But women’s rights activist French Gates gave Gates some stern advice: “Get up or get off the game.”
“Investors would always ask me, ‘What happens when you two have kids?’ And I remember crying about it once. I called my mom and she said, ‘Wake up or get out of the game, sis.’ I was like, oh my god,” Gates said in an episode of the show. please call her daddy Podcast published in April 2025.
These are now the words Gates says to himself as he navigates meetings with investors, trying to refute Nepo Baby’s accusations. Gates insists this is more than just a legacy project.
“The chip on my shoulder is not only to prove myself, but also to build something novel and unique that consumers actually love,” she said.
A version of this article was published on Fortune.com on February 21, 2026.
