eBay Ventures Expands Fashion Bets As Phia Faces Cookie-Stuffing Scrutiny
eBay Ventures is expanding its bets across secondhand fashion, authentication and circular commerce as scrutiny grows around the company’s broader investment strategy.
Recent investments show how eBay is placing capital across multiple parts of the fashion resale cycle, from sourcing and authentication to wardrobe management, shopping discovery and eventual resale.
For example, optical authentication company Alitheon raised $8 million in a Series A1 round in June led by Emerald Technology Ventures with significant participation from eBay Ventures.
The company’s FeaturePrint technology uses optical AI to identify individual objects through unique surface characteristics visible in ordinary photographs, without relying on serial numbers, tags or other markers that can be removed or counterfeited.
While the technology can be used across many industries, it has obvious potential for fashion resale, where marketplaces must determine whether luxury goods, sneakers, watches and other high-value products are authentic.
For eBay, the investment could provide an early look at technology that may strengthen authentication and provenance across categories where trust remains central to buyer confidence.
eBay also joined a $25 million Series B round for Fleek, a business-to-business platform connecting secondhand clothing suppliers with retailers and resellers.
The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in Vinted, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs and H14.
Fleek says it connects more than 2,000 suppliers with over 50,000 buyers across more than 100 countries. Its technology uses smartphone photos to grade and price secondhand clothing, bringing more automation to a wholesale market still heavily dependent on manual sorting, inspection and negotiation.
Fleek’s buyers include vintage sellers and independent retailers that need a steady flow of secondhand inventory, giving eBay insight into how professional resellers source merchandise and where friction remains in the wholesale process.
Meanwhile, eBay Ventures and Google’s AI Futures Fund led a $7 million seed round for Whering, a digital wardrobe app that allows users to catalog clothing they already own, create outfits, share wardrobes and receive styling suggestions.
A digital wardrobe can help identify what a shopper already owns, how often items are worn and when they may be ready to sell, donate or replace them. That data could become increasingly valuable as marketplaces compete to make resale a more routine part of fashion ownership rather than a separate transaction consumers think about only when clearing out a closet.
Through its venture capital arm, eBay is gaining exposure to businesses that influence where secondhand inventory comes from, how it is verified, how shoppers discover it and when consumers decide to return items to the resale market.
Some of those investments have already developed into larger strategic relationships.
eBay Ventures’ first investment, Norwegian secondhand marketplace Tise, eventually led to an acquisition. Tise brings social features including follows, likes, comments and personalized recommendations that could influence eBay’s own consumer-to-consumer fashion experience.
Liz Morton
But the results have not all been positive.
UK luxury resale company Cudoni shut down in April 2023, just three months after raising £7.5 million in a round backed by eBay Ventures.
Liz Morton
AI-powered shopping assistant Phia, which raised an $8 million seed round in 2025 with backing from eBay Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and several celebrity investors, is now facing scrutiny over cookie-stuffing allegations.
The app, founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, later raised another $35 million at a reported valuation of approximately $185 million, bringing total funding to more than $40 million.
Phia helps shoppers compare prices across new and secondhand fashion sites, flagging coupon codes and cash-back opportunities, and makes money through affiliate commissions when a retailer attributes a purchase to one of its links.
A Bloomberg investigation published last week accused Phia of using a form of affiliate fraud known as cookie stuffing to claim credit for sales it did not generate.
Olivia Solon and Jeff Kao and Priyanjana Bengani
In a normal affiliate transaction, a shopper clicks a publisher or creator’s tracked link before visiting a retailer. That click places tracking information in the shopper’s browser, allowing the retailer to identify the referring affiliate and pay a commission if the visit leads to a purchase.
Cookie stuffing inserts or replaces that tracking information without a legitimate referral.
The technique can cause a retailer to pay a commission when the customer was already shopping on the site, arrived directly or was actually referred by someone else. It can also overwrite the tracking code of the publisher or affiliate that genuinely drove the sale, taking both the commission and credit for the transaction.
Bloomberg reported that Phia’s browser extension opened hidden background tabs to retailer sites and inserted its own affiliate tracking information without users intentionally clicking a Phia link.
In one example, a shopper who followed a Wirecutter recommendation to make a purchase could allegedly have Phia’s affiliate code inserted later, allowing Phia to receive credit instead of Wirecutter.
The reported behavior could make Phia appear to retailers and investors as though it was driving more sales than it actually generated, while legitimate affiliates lost commissions.
TechCrunch reported that affiliate platform Impact.com suspended Phia after Bloomberg brought the findings to its attention.
Phia said it did not intentionally take credit for sales it had not earned and described the behavior as a legacy technical issue involving how its browser extension checked for available cash-back offers.
The company said it changed the extension after being contacted by Bloomberg and a later test reportedly found the hidden tabs were no longer being opened.
Ironically, eBay was once on the other side of a major cookie-stuffing case involving affiliates Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, giving the allegations against Phia particular relevance for its venture funding partner.
In the mid-2000s, websites operated by Hogan and Dunning allegedly placed eBay affiliate cookies in users’ browsers without a legitimate referral, allowing them to collect commissions when those users later made purchases on eBay.
eBay worked with the FBI to investigate the activity and sued Hogan, Dunning and related companies in 2008. Federal prosecutors later brought wire fraud cases, and both men pleaded guilty.
Jim Edwards
Hogan’s company received more than $28 million from eBay, while Dunning’s received about $5.2 million during the period covered by his plea.
That history creates an awkward contrast for eBay Ventures. eBay once treated cookie stuffing as serious fraud and pursued affiliates accused of taking credit for sales they did not generate.
Now it's an investor in a fashion shopping app accused of using a similar attribution tactic against other retailers and publishers.
There is no indication eBay participated in or knew about Phia’s alleged practices, and a venture investment does not give it control over a portfolio company’s daily operations.
The controversy still raises questions about the technical and compliance review applied to investments built around affiliate tracking, browser extensions, consumer data and retailer relationships.
It may also bring greater scrutiny to eBay's own advertising practices, especially as controversial new Promoted Listings ad attribution policies highlight a double standard in how the company handles seller-paid advertising products compared to the eBay Partner Network and Ambassador affiliate programs.
Liz Morton
The issue carries even more weight since a former eBay employee filed suit against the company, alleging she was unlawfully terminated after raising concerns about disability accommodations, discrimination, retaliation and possible manipulation of Promoted Listings metrics, data and reporting.
Liz Morton
Those claims have not yet been tested in court, and eBay is seeking to move most of the case into private arbitration. Still, they add another layer of scrutiny around how the company measures and attributes advertising performance.
For now, Phia remains listed on the eBay Ventures portfolio page as a “sustainable shopping assistant.”
Alitheon, Fleek and Whering had not yet been added at the time of publication.
