Fleek, a London startup building the software plumbing behind the global secondhand clothing trade, has raised $25m in Series B funding to scale the AI it uses to sort, grade and price used garments. The round takes the company’s total funding to $45m.
It was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early backer of Vinted and a lead investor in that company’s Series C. eBay, FJ Labs and H14 also took part, alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital and Y Combinator.
The problem Fleek is chasing is bigger than most shoppers realise. Every year, up to 24 billion secondhand items travel from donation bins in cities such as London, Paris and New York to sorting and grading centres scattered across the world.
Yet the infrastructure moving all of it remains stubbornly analogue. Despite sitting inside a $200bn-plus industry, garments are still assessed by hand, graded against inconsistent standards and traded through disconnected networks with little pricing transparency.
That matters because demand is running ahead of the plumbing. Secondhand fashion is growing about three times faster than traditional apparel, and Fleek’s argument is that the sector cannot scale to meet that appetite while so much of it stays offline.
