Consumers' habits and needs are changing at speed, and it's not all about fast fashion. Younger generations, in particular, consider the resale value of what they buy before buying it. And many make second-hand marketplaces their first place to buy.
In opposition to the blight of fast fashion, P2P retail sales are booming, especially among younger generations.
Bought is a Finnish secondhand tech startup founded in 2024 that aims to make selling pre-owned items as effortless as buying them.
Today the company announced that it has purchased the discontinued marketplace Netflea.com — its second acquisition. Founded in 2014, the platform had over 200,000 users across 13 European markets. At its peak, the company generated up to 3 million euros in annual revenue. The brand operated under Vähänkäytetty.fi in its local market, Finland.
I spoke with Erik Kymäläinen, CEO and co-founder of Bought, to learn more — but before we dive into the acquisition, Bought’s story is worth a closer look.
Solving the pain point of secondhand selling
Kymäläinen admits that Bought is built “for people like me — and honestly, most of my friends — who have every intention of selling secondhand items, but never get around to it.
I’ve always loved the idea of secondhand. I’ve tried every platform over the past five years. But until recently, I had never sold a single thing.”
A year ago, he realised the issue isn’t the idea of selling— it's the execution.
“Even though it only takes a minute to list something, it still feels like a chore. That’s the friction we’re solving. The secondhand market is exploding — doubling every three years— and yet the big bottleneck is still getting people to actually sell their stuff."
Bought turns recommerce completely on its head
Traditionally, buying and reselling are completely separate experiences.
Kymäläinen explained:
“When you buy something online, the product page provides all the necessary information—photos, descriptions, and specifications. But when it comes to reselling it, you have to start from scratch. It makes no sense.”
Bought believes that every item you purchase should stay in the market. Selling shouldn't require making a decision—it should be as simple as accepting an offer when it feels right.
“That’s the big unlock: we remove the friction of listing by automatically generating sellable listings from your purchase data.”
Automatic listings from your Inbox
Bought’s platform connects with email providers like Gmail and Outlook through secure integrations.
“When users sign in, we scan for receipts from over 1,000 supported retailers, " shared Kymäläinen.
“From those, we can extract the item photo, description, price, and other metadata. That lets us create an automatic listing in seconds.”
The listings are surprisingly effective — people trust the original stock photo and product details. Users can of course tweak things like condition, but many don’t need to.
But what about email privacy?
Bound takes privacy and data sensitivity extremely seriously. Users explicitly grant permission via Google's or Microsoft’s secure APIs.
Bought doesn’t access inboxes directly, and only extracts data relevant for generating listings. Kymäläinen explained:
“Our entire infrastructure has to pass annual security reviews —like Google’s Cloud Application Security Assessment — just to maintain API access.
We just passed it again last week. It’s not trivial, but it ensures we meet the highest standards in terms of data handling and privacy.”
Secondhand, delivered in as little as an hour
Bought users can now order secondhand items directly from people nearby, with Wolt deliveries arriving at their doorstep in as little as an hour. The service is the first of its kind globally.
Further, everything you buy through Bought goes into your “virtual closet.”
Kymäläinen explained:
“If it doesn’t fit or you change your mind, you can resell it instantly — no relisting required.
Over time, this creates a self-sustaining inventory model, where everything you’ve ever bought is continuously available for resale. It’s great for buyers, great for sellers, and also good for us as a business because we’re not constantly fighting for new supply.”
But now back to the acquisition.
Buying data, not just a marketplace
Netflea was one of the pioneers of secondhand e-commerce in Finland. They started back in 2014 and had a great run, but they struggled to scale supply.
Kymäläinen contends that that’s the crux of this space — figuring out how to get people to list and sell effortlessly. “Without a unique unlock, it’s hard to grow.”
The operations of Netflea.com were shut down earlier this year by the parent company’s bankruptcy estate. Bought does not plan to relaunch the marketplace but will offer its users the opportunity to automatically transfer their purchase and sales history to the new Bought app.
“Many of the clothes bought from Netflea.com are once again sitting in IKEA bags waiting for their next owners. By bringing users’ purchase history to Bought, users can automatically list their items for resale. Items still in use can be stored in their profile’s virtual closet,” Kymäläinen explains.
We’re offering them a way to relist the things they once sold or bought instantly."
But more importantly, the acquisition wasn’t about buying an active marketplace, it was about buying a chance to re-engage 200,000 past users and leverage their historical purchase data.
“That kind of historical footprint is incredibly valuable in our model.”
This is Bought’s second acquisition in six months — fast footwork for a company founded in 2024.
Kymäläinen declared:
“We’re opportunistic. With Netflea, the value is in the dormant users and their data. With Zadaa, our first acquisition, it was a large and still-active marketplace. What ties them together is that we’re not buying traffic or revenue, we’re buying a chance to unlock latent supply in new ways.
Honestly, I don’t know who else would have benefited from acquiring Netflea’s data, but for us, it’s gold.”
Scaling fast, but smart
Bought currently limited to Finland as Kymäläinen asserts it’s important to perfect the product locally, especially because logistics like same-day pickup are so hyperlocal.
“But once we’re ready to scale, we’ll move quickly. This model would work brilliantly in cities like Berlin or London where people are sitting on tons of unused goods.”
“With marketplaces, size matters—more supply drives more demand, and vice versa. Once we know people love the product and we’ve truly removed the barriers to selling, we want to become the biggest secondhand platform in Europe.”
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