Fleek, a London-based startup building AI-powered infrastructure for the global secondhand clothing trade, has secured $25 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early backer of Vinted, with notable participation from eBay and existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz. This capital injection will fuel the company's mission to digitize and streamline a traditionally manual and fragmented industry, bringing its total funding to $45 million.
Addressing an Analog Industry
The secondhand fashion market, valued at over $200 billion, is growing approximately three times faster than the traditional apparel sector. Despite this rapid expansion, the underlying infrastructure remains largely offline, manual, and inefficient. Annually, billions of garments are assessed by hand using inconsistent standards, creating bottlenecks and limiting the industry's ability to scale.
An AI-Powered Marketplace Solution
Founded in 2021 by CEO Abhi Arora and CTO Sanket Agarwal, Fleek addresses this challenge with a B2B marketplace powered by proprietary AI. The platform is designed to digitize the entire supply chain, from initial sorting to final sale. This integrated approach provides the technological backbone necessary for the industry to meet escalating consumer demand for pre-owned fashion.
At the core of its technology is Fleek Sort, a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand transactions. This AI tool automates the laborious process of identifying, categorizing, and grading used garments from photos or videos. By transforming a manual task into a digital one, it creates consistent, scalable inventory processing for suppliers worldwide.
Strategic Investment and Growth
The funding round signals strong investor confidence, led by Burda Principal Investments, which has a proven track record in the sector with Vinted. The participation of industry giant eBay alongside venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator underscores the perceived value of Fleek's solution. This strategic backing provides both capital and deep industry expertise to the growing company.
Fleek plans to allocate the fresh capital toward accelerating the development of its AI-native marketplace and expanding its engineering teams. The investment will also be used to scale its technology platform and grow its global network of buyers and suppliers. This strategic deployment of funds is aimed at solidifying the company's position as a critical infrastructure provider for the resale market.
Building a Data-Driven Future
Co-founder Sanket Agarwal emphasized that the platform captures vast amounts of previously untapped data from the supply chain. Every transaction improves the AI's understanding of inventory value, demand, and market trends. This creates a proprietary intelligence layer that becomes more powerful as the marketplace grows, benefiting all participants in the ecosystem.
The company already connects over 2,000 wholesale suppliers with more than 50,000 retailers and resellers across 100 countries. To date, Fleek has facilitated the circulation of over 12 million items, contributing to significant water and CO₂ emissions savings. This scale demonstrates the platform's tangible impact on both the industry's efficiency and its overall sustainability.
With its latest $25 million in funding, Fleek is well-positioned to continue its disruption of the secondhand clothing market's outdated systems. By building the essential AI and marketplace infrastructure, the company is not just fixing a broken system but also enabling the future of circular fashion. This investment marks a significant step toward creating a more efficient, transparent, and scalable global resale industry.