Fleek has raised £19 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted backer and lead investor in its Series C round, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator and more. Fleek is building the AI infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry through a B2B marketplace connecting wholesale suppliers and graders with buyers worldwide. The raise brings Fleek's total funding to over £30 million and will supercharge its AI engine, unlock more secondhand supply and expand the marketplace it powers.
Every year, up to 24 billion items travel from donation bins in London, Paris and New York to textile sorting and grading centres around the world, yet the infrastructure powering this $200+ billion industry remains manual, fragmented and offline. Garments are still assessed by hand, graded using inconsistent standards and traded through disconnected networks with little pricing transparency. At the centre of Fleek's platform is Fleek Sort, a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions from Fleek's global network over the past four years, which helps identify, categorise, grade and merchandise secondhand garments using photographs or videos. Already used by graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai, and in pilots launching in the United Kingdom, Europe and the US, Fleek Sort continuously learns from real-world outcomes as more inventory is graded, listed and sold through the platform.
Once processed, inventory is automatically listed on Fleek's marketplace, where pricing, search, recommendation and matching systems connect stock with relevant buyers around the world. Every transaction generates additional data that improves the platform's understanding of secondhand inventory, creating a proprietary intelligence layer for the industry. Through this, Fleek helps suppliers increase recovery rates, enables buyers to source inventory more efficiently and reduces the volume of wasted clothing. Demand for secondhand fashion is growing three times faster than traditional apparel, according to BCG.
Today, Fleek's platform connects 2,000+ verified wholesale suppliers and graders with 50,000+ retailers, resellers and boutiques across 100+ countries. The company has helped keep more than 12 million items in circulation, saving an estimated 13 billion litres of water, avoiding 23,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and empowering thousands of secondhand and vintage clothing entrepreneurs. Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek is now expanding AI across inventory processing, merchandising, marketplace operations, buyer discovery and its own internal operations and product development.
Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it. It travels thousands of miles, gets sorted by hand in a warehouse in Karachi, and finds its way back to a vintage shop in London or New York, if it's lucky. We started Fleek because that system is broken, the market it serves is exploding, and nobody is building the technology and infrastructure to fix it.
There's more data locked inside the global secondhand supply chain than almost any other market, yet historically very little of it has been captured. We've built the world's first AI trained specifically to understand secondhand inventory - what it is, what it's worth, who wants it and where demand exists. Every transaction improves that understanding, creating an intelligence layer we believe will become critical infrastructure for the future of the industry.
We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. We know what it takes to build a platform that scales in this market. From its growing supplier network to the technology behind it, Fleek is building the infrastructure the next generation of fashion will rely on.
