How phiaco Built a 300M+ Item Search Index in Their First Year | phoebegates sophiakianni I sat down with Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, co-founders of Phia, the AI alignment layer for commerce that just raised $35M at a $185M valuation with a team of under 20 people, more than half of whom are engineers. We get into the technical decisions that actually moved the needle. They ditched third party LLMs and APIs to build their own in house search index and the results were hard to ignore: 80% decrease in latency, a significant jump in search accuracy, and 40% increase in monetized GMV. We also talk through the SKU unification problem at scale, how personalization became their core technical moat, and why owning their own model was never really optional for what they were building. If you’re building AI products, pay attention to how they think about the MVP to in house pipeline. They use vibe coding to validate whether users actually care about a feature before committing real engin...