Phia, the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has been suspended from Impact.com, a leading affiliate and influencer marketing platform, after a Bloomberg investigation found the company engaged in cookie stuffing — taking affiliate commission credit for purchases its browser extension did not actually drive TechCrunch.

The Bloomberg report, published around July 9, 2026, along with findings from an independent consultant and a Phia competitor, described a consistent pattern: when a user shopped at an online retailer through Phia's extension, the software would silently open a new tab in the background during checkout Bloomberg. That background process would override referral codes already attached to the session from other affiliates and inject Phia's own tracking cookie instead, positioning the startup to collect commission on transactions it played no role in originating.

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg the company had made all necessary changes to address the issue, and Bloomberg's own follow-up check confirmed the cookie-stuffing behavior had been resolved. TechCrunch reported it reached out to Phia for comment on the story and received no response.

Phia was founded in 2025 by Gates, who was 23 at the time of launch, and Kianni Business of Fashion. The company has raised a total of $43.5 million from investors, a figure that supersedes the roughly $35 million previously reported at the time of its January 2026 funding round TechCrunch. Its backers include Kim Kardashian and Hailey Bieber, a roster that has helped the app punch above its weight in press coverage relative to its size in the crowded shopping-tools category.

Phia's core product is a browser extension that scans for the lowest price on an item across retailers and surfaces applicable discount codes at checkout. Like most tools in this space, its business model runs on affiliate marketing: Phia takes a commission when a user completes a purchase that the platform is credited with influencing. That commission structure is precisely what gives cookie stuffing its financial logic, and it's the same mechanic at the center of an ongoing class action lawsuit against Honey, the PayPal-owned browser extension that faced similar allegations.

The technical mechanism described in the Bloomberg investigation is a known category of affiliate fraud that predates the current wave of AI-assisted and browser-extension shopping tools by well over a decade. Attribution in affiliate marketing runs on a last-click model in most networks: whichever cookie is present at the moment of purchase gets the credit, regardless of which affiliate actually influenced the buying decision. A background tab that fires after a user has already navigated to a retailer and begun checkout can silently claim that last click without ever having driven traffic to the site in the first place. Networks like Impact.com exist partly to police this kind of behavior, and suspension is the standard first-line enforcement response once a violation is substantiated.

This isn't the first data-related scrutiny Phia has faced. Fortune reported in November 2025 that the app was collecting more user information than its stated purpose of tracking fashion preferences would suggest Fortune. Taken together with the cookie-stuffing findings, the two episodes point to a pattern of Phia's technical implementation running ahead of, or in tension with, the transparency claims made to users and retail partners.

The broader context here is that shopping-extension startups occupy a structurally tempting position: they sit in the browser at the exact moment a purchase decision is finalized, with privileged access to the checkout flow. That proximity is the entire value proposition — comparison pricing and discount discovery only work if the tool can see and interact with the transaction — but it also creates the technical opportunity for exactly the kind of last-click override Bloomberg documented. The Honey litigation established that this is not a theoretical risk confined to one company; it is close to an occupational hazard of the category, and one worth regulators and ad networks watching more systematically rather than case by case.

For retailers and other affiliates whose referral credit was displaced, the practical damage is measurable in diverted commission revenue, though neither Bloomberg nor TechCrunch has published an estimate of the total sums involved. For Phia, the immediate consequence is the Impact.com suspension itself, which cuts off a distribution and monetization channel while the platform presumably reviews the fix Phia says it has implemented. Whether that suspension is lifted, and on what terms, is likely to depend on Impact.com's own audit of the remediation Phia's spokesperson described to Bloomberg.