Microsoft Inc. (MSFT) founder Bill Gates’s daughter Phoebe Gates has been an entrepreneur from years. The young woman recently secured $30 million in funding for an AI app that she built with Stanford University classmate, Sophia Kianni. Phoebe, the youngest daughter of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates founded a start-up called Phia with Sophia. 

The app developed by them is an artificial intelligence power shopping platform. It has high-profile backers such as celebrity Hailey Bieber as well as Spanks founder, Sara Blakely. Meta’s former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg has also invested in the start-up.

A company spokesperson confirmed that the start up has secured a new round of funding, according to Bloomberg. The New York based firm is now valued at $180 million. Phia had raised $8 million in September.

Phoebe Gates and Sofia Kianni explored several practical applications of generative AI before deciding to build a shopping platform powered by AI. They were granted $250,000 from a Stanford social entrepreneurship program. This helped them to develop the project full time and they relocated to New York.

The Gates family told Phoebe to pursue this project “as a side thing” according to an interview with Elle. They told her that she had to finish school, unlike her father, Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard University to launch Microsoft in 1975. He is publicly supportive of her startup, but has not invested in the company.

Kianni told Vogue that she had temporarily paused her degree “to learn, as quickly as possible,” as much as they could about the industry that they would operate in.

The generative AI tool from from Phia has crossed 750,000 downloads in eight months. It is available as an app and as a browser extension for Chrome and Safari. It uses listings from over 40,000 retail and resale sites to give web fans comparative prices, and real time deals. It also determines the cost of an item as typical, high or fair.