It is the kind of office move that gets noticed before the boxes are even unpacked. Phia, the AI-powered shopping app founded by Phoebe Gates, has signed a lease for penthouse space inside a newly renovated building on East 18th Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, according to a report published by Curbed this week.
The company arrived at the new address carrying some weight. Earlier this year Phia closed a $36 million funding round backed by a roster of celebrity investors — the names and the number together doing the kind of press work that most early-stage startups spend years chasing. The app itself is an AI shopping assistant, designed to help users track down products and compare prices across retailers without the usual tab-juggling.
Gates launched Phia while she was still enrolled at Stanford, and the company has moved at a pace that tends to attract real estate upgrades. The Flatiron penthouse fits a pattern the neighborhood has been running for a while now: consumer-tech and lifestyle brands treating the blocks between Madison Square Park and Union Square as a kind of finishing-school zip code, one rung above the startup loft and one below the midtown tower.
Details on square footage and lease terms were not disclosed. The building itself has undergone recent renovation, which in current Flatiron terms typically means exposed concrete, high ceilings, and a roof deck that doubles as an amenity line in the listing. Whether Phia uses it for team meetings or pitch decks, the penthouse address is already doing some of the work.