Following a Bloomberg investigation into irregular revenue practices, the founders of e-commerce startup Phia have publicly congratulated their engineering team for a seamless deployment of code designed to claim purchases the company had nothing to do with.
The platform, co-founded by Sophia Kianni and Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates, was recently accused of “cookie stuffing”—a practice where a browser extension quietly injects affiliate tracking tags onto retail websites to claim unearned sales commissions. Rather than issue an apology, Phia leadership praised the backend architecture for executing its core directive across thousands of browsers without ever alerting the consumer.
We looked at e-commerce from first principles and realized the most frictionless way to generate revenue was to simply wait for you to do all the shopping yourself, and then intercept the final click.
Internal company documents indicate the founders initially envisioned Phia as a bridge between sustainable fashion brands and environmentally conscious Gen Z consumers. However, the company's roadmap was reportedly altered once developers realized that silently claiming a 4 percent cut of a user’s unrelated Sephora checkout required significantly less effort than building an actual marketplace.
The startup is currently leveraging its inflated conversion metrics to raise a $15 million Series A, anchored entirely by the commissions generated when users forgot to uninstall the extension before buying major household appliances on HomeDepot.com.