Quick Facts

• Business of Fashion and Bloomberg reported on July 9, 2026, that Phia claimed affiliate commissions on sales it did not drive.
• Phia, co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has raised $43 million and is valued at approximately $185 million.
• A separate November 2025 investigation found Phia’s browser extension was capturing full copies of users’ web pages, including bank statements and emails, without clear disclosure.

Phia, the AI shopping browser extension co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is under fire for allegedly claiming affiliate marketing commissions on purchases it did not influence. Business of Fashion and Bloomberg published simultaneous reports on July 9, 2026, detailing the accusations.

The app, whose name combines its founders’ first names, positions itself as a personal shopping assistant. It compares prices across 350 million items and more than 220,000 sites, auto-applies coupon codes at checkout, and earns commissions from retail partners including Reformation, Abercrombie, and Prada when users complete purchases.

The problem sits at the center of how affiliate marketing attribution works. When a customer buys something online, the last affiliate cookie placed on their browser typically receives credit for the sale. Browser extensions can exploit this by inserting tracking cookies into transactions already underway, collecting commissions on sales they had no role in generating.

This method, known as cookie stuffing or cookie dropping, places tracking data on users’ browsers without their knowledge. The extension triggers a script when a user lands on a merchant checkout page, capturing last-click attribution even if the shopping session started somewhere else. The tactic mirrors accusations previously leveled at the browser extension Honey.

The financial consequences for merchants are real. Industry estimates suggest between 10% and 50% of affiliate-channel budgets can be lost to this type of misattribution. Retailers end up paying commissions to parties who generated no demand, while legitimate discovery channels lose credit.

Gates and Kianni dropped out of Stanford to build Phia full time. Kianni described the founding problem as the difficulty of comparing prices across new and secondhand fashion sites simultaneously. The company compares its function to Google Flights, but applied to clothing and accessories.

The affiliate controversy is not Phia’s first credibility problem. In November 2025, four cybersecurity researchers told Fortune that a previous version of the extension was capturing full HTML snapshots of every web page users visited, including pages containing bank statements and private emails, and transmitting that data back to Phia’s servers through a function called logCompleteHTMLtoGCS.

Maahir Sharma, a former Meta software engineer, was the first to flag the issue. He noticed the extension making server requests while he checked Gmail, with no interaction on his part. Alexandre Pauwels, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Cambridge, said the company’s privacy policy failed to disclose the scraping and contradicted the data actually being collected.

A Phia spokesperson said the logging was done in an aggregate and anonymous way to identify new retail websites and that the company never stored the data. TechCrunch reported Phia removed the feature after being notified.

Phia has raised $43 million to date, including a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital, and carries a valuation of approximately $185 million. The dual controversies, affiliate misattribution and unauthorized data collection, arrive as regulators and retailers are paying closer attention to browser extensions that insert themselves into the purchase funnel.

For DTC brands and retailers using affiliate programs, the Phia situation is a reminder to audit commission attribution carefully. Last-click attribution models remain vulnerable to manipulation by extensions that activate at checkout, regardless of whether the extension influenced the original purchase decision.

Read more: Phia Shopping App Took Credit for Sales It Didn’t Drive