YC-backed Fleek raises €22 million to build AI infrastructure keeping global secondhand fashion on fleek

Fleek, a London-based startup building the AI infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry, today announced it has raised €21.9 million ($25 million) in Series B funding, bringing its total funding amount to €39.4 million ($45 million). 

The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator, and more.

Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek, said, “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.”

Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek is building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it.

The company references a study indicating that annually, as many as 24 billion items are transported from donation bins in London, Paris, and New York to textile sorting and grading centres worldwide. It further notes that, despite demand for secondhand fashion growing three times faster than traditional apparel, the infrastructure powering this €175.3+ billion ($200+ billion) industry is manual, fragmented and offline.

It highlights that garments are still assessed by hand, graded using inconsistent standards and traded through disconnected networks with little pricing transparency. Without digitalisation, the industry simply cannot scale to meet the demand already in front of it, the UK startup asserts. 

Fleek claims that it combines a B2B marketplace with proprietary AI systems that help suppliers, graders, retailers and resellers source, process and trade secondhand inventory at scale.

Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Fleek, said, “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.”

Fleek highlights that it is evolving into a fully AI-native platform for the global secondhand industry. The company has expanded AI across inventory processing, merchandising, marketplace operations and buyer discovery. It notes that its proprietary models are continuously trained on marketplace activity to improve inventory discovery and transform how secondhand goods are bought and sold at scale. As marketplace activity increases, Fleek’s models keep enhancing, making it easier for buyers and sellers to manage the complexities of secondhand inventory.

Fleek is also applying AI across its internal operations and product development, helping teams move faster and scale more efficiently as the platform grows.

Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said, “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.”

The company plans to use this fresh capital to accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering teams, scale its technology platform and grow its global buyer and supplier network.

Today, Fleek connects 2,000+ wholesale suppliers and graders with 50,000+ buyers across 100+ countries.