- Connects more than 2,000 verified wholesale suppliers and graders with over 50,000 retailers, resellers, and boutiques across 100-plus countries.
- The platform has helped keep more than 12m items in circulation — an effort the company estimates has saved roughly 13b litres of water and avoided 23,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.
The global secondhand clothing market is worth over $$200 billion and growing three times faster than traditional apparel — yet the infrastructure that moves garments from donation bins to vintage boutiques remains stubbornly analog. Fleek, a startup building the digital and AI layer for this sprawling supply chain, announced it has raised $25 million in Series B funding to change that.
The round was led by Burda Principal Investments — an early backer of Vinted and lead investor in its Series C — with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator also joined the round, signaling sustained confidence in Fleek’s approach to a largely overlooked corner of the fashion economy.
Every year, as many as 24 billion clothing items make a journey that most people never think about. A jacket dropped into a London charity bin, a dress left at a Paris collection point, a pair of jeans discarded in New York — these garments travel thousands of miles to textile sorting and grading centers, primarily across Asia and the Middle East.
There, they are assessed by hand, graded according to inconsistent standards, and traded through fragmented networks with little pricing transparency. The result is a system that cannot scale to meet the demand already pressing against it — and a staggering volume of clothing that ends up wasted.
Fleek, founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, set out to digitise this entire workflow.
Teaching AI to think like a grader
At the centre of Fleek’s platform is Fleek Sort, a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions accumulated across the company’s global network over four years. The model identifies, categorizes, grades, and merchandises secondhand garments from photographs or video — turning what has historically been a manual, subjective process into a standardised digital workflow.
Fleek Sort is already in use by graders at sorting hubs in Pakistan, India, and Dubai, with pilots launching in the UK, Europe, and the United States. Critically, the model is not static: as more inventory flows through the platform — graded, listed, sold — it continuously learns from real-world outcomes, refining its accuracy and recommendations over time.
Once garments are processed, they are automatically listed on Fleek’s B2B marketplace. There, AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation, and matching systems connect inventory with relevant buyers worldwide. Every transaction feeds back into the platform’s intelligence, deepening its understanding of what secondhand goods are worth, who wants them, and where demand exists.
Scale and impact
The numbers tell a story of rapid adoption. Fleek now connects more than 2,000 verified wholesale suppliers and graders with over 50,000 retailers, resellers, and boutiques across 100-plus countries.
To date, the platform has helped keep more than 12 million items in circulation — an effort the company estimates has saved roughly 13 billion liters of water and avoided 23,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions, while empowering thousands of secondhand and vintage clothing entrepreneurs around the world.
An AI-native platform for a new era of resale
With the fresh capital, Fleek plans to accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering teams, scale its technology platform, and grow its global buyer and supplier network. The company is embedding AI across inventory processing, merchandising, marketplace operations, and buyer discovery — building what it describes as a proprietary intelligence layer for the industry.
That intelligence layer will become increasingly vital as new regulations, surging resale demand, and growing volumes of secondhand inventory place greater strain on existing supply chains. Fleek is also applying AI across its internal operations and product development to move faster as the platform scales.
“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,” said Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Fleek.
“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.”
Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO, framed the problem in starkly human terms: “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.”
A proven thesis
For Burda Principal Investments, the bet on Fleek echoes an earlier conviction. “We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche,” said Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments. “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.”
As resale moves from niche to mainstream — and as the sheer volume of secondhand goods demands a more intelligent, more scalable approach — Fleek is positioning itself not just as a marketplace, but as the operating system for an industry that the world is only beginning to take seriously.
