Fleek, the company building AI infrastructure to power the global secondhand clothing industry, has raised $25m (£18.7m) in Series B funding. Every year, up to 24 billion items travel from donation bins in London, Paris and New York to textile sorting and grading centres across the world. Despite demand for
Kirstie Pickering
Fleek, the company building AI infrastructure to power the global secondhand clothing industry, has raised $25m (£18.7m) in Series B funding.
Every year, up to 24 billion items travel from donation bins in London, Paris and New York to textile sorting and grading centres across the world. Despite demand for secondhand fashion growing three times faster than traditional apparel, Fleek says the infrastructure powering the industry is manual, fragmented and offline.
Fleek is building infrastructure to power the global secondhand clothing industry through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it.
At the centre of the 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.
Already used by graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai and in pilots launching in the UK, Europe and the US, Fleek Sort helps identify, categorise, grade and merchandise secondhand garments using photographs or videos, transforming a historically manual process into a digital workflow.
Once processed, inventory is automatically listed on Fleek’s marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation and matching systems connect stock with relevant buyers around the world.
The Series B funding will accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering teams, scale its technology platform and grow its global buyer and supplier network.
The investment was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted backer, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14 alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator, and more.
“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,” says Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek.
“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.”
