Fleek raises $25m to build the AI infrastructure powering global secondhand fashion
Fleek founders Sanket Agarwal (left) and Abhi Arora
The investment was 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.
The hidden infrastructure behind secondhand fashion
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. Yet despite demand for secondhand fashion growing three times faster than traditional apparel, the infrastructure powering this $200+ billion industry is manual, fragmented and offline. 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.
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.
Teaching AI to understand secondhand inventory
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. As more inventory is graded, listed and sold through the platform, Fleek Sort continuously learns from real-world outcomes, refining its recommendations and improving accuracy over time.
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. 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.
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.
Connecting the global secondhand economy
Building on the infrastructure and marketplace network it has established, Fleek 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. 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 grows, Fleek’s models continue to improve, helping buyers and sellers navigate the complexity of secondhand inventory more efficiently.
This intelligence layer will become increasingly important as new regulations, growing resale demand and rising volumes of secondhand inventory place greater pressure on existing supply chains. The company is also applying AI across its internal operations and product development, helping teams move faster and scale more efficiently as the platform grows.
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."
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."
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."
-Ends-
About Fleek
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. Founded in London in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, the company combines a B2B marketplace with proprietary AI systems that help suppliers, graders, retailers and resellers source, process and trade secondhand inventory at scale. Today, Fleek connects 2,000+ wholesale suppliers and graders with 50,000+ buyers across 100+ countries while digitising the supply chain behind the global resale economy. www.joinfleek.com.
Antonella Scimemi
Burlington PR
+44 7530 815018
email us here
Legal Disclaimer:
EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.
