Phia Claimed Affiliate Sales It Didn't Drive, Bloomberg Finds

A Bloomberg investigation into Phia, the AI shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, found that the software was taking affiliate credit for online sales it hadn't actually driven, and was overwriting other referrers' tracking codes in the process. Bloomberg's Olivia Solon, who reported the story, said on X that testing showed Phia "replaced other referrers' affiliate codes in violation of stand-down policies."

That matters because affiliate revenue is the load-bearing part of the business. Phia bills itself as a personal shopping assistant that helps users find lower prices on clothes and fashion accessories, and the commissions retailers pay on the resulting purchases are how the app monetizes. If the attribution the retailer pays out on is wrong, if the click that closed the sale came from somewhere else or from no real user session at all, those payouts are money the retailer would never have agreed to. That is the entire economic basis of every couponing and cashback extension, and it is enforced by "stand-down" rules that tell tools not to insert their own referral code when a competing partner already owns the click.

The timing is rough for the company. Phia raised a $35.5 million Series A in January at a $185.5 million valuation, on top of an earlier seed that brought total funding to $43.5 million, with backers including Sydney Sweeney, Khloé Kardashian and Ice Spice attached to the story. It is also not the first time the product has drawn scrutiny; Fortune reported in November 2025 that security researchers found the browser extension was pulling more user data than the company had disclosed.

The honest caveat is that this rests on Bloomberg's own testing rather than a regulator or retailer going on the record, and much of the piece sits behind a paywall. What the reporting doesn't obviously give you is Phia's on-record response to the specific cookie stuffing finding, a full list of the merchants and affiliate networks affected, or whether any have already moved to suspend the app. What it does give you is a very clean question for anyone weighing a brand partnership right now: if the incremental sales an attribution tool claims aren't actually incremental, the entire deal is priced wrong, and every affiliate network the app touches has reason to check its logs this week.