Fleek secures $25M to digitise secondhand fashion

Fleek, a UK-based startup developing AI infrastructure for the secondhand clothing industry, has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14 and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital and Y Combinator.

Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek operates a B2B marketplace connecting wholesale secondhand clothing suppliers with retailers and resellers worldwide. The company aims to digitise a secondhand clothing supply chain that still relies heavily on manual sorting, grading and trading processes despite growing global demand for resale.

Alongside its marketplace, Fleek has developed AI tools that automate textile sorting, grading and merchandising. Its proprietary AI model, Fleek Sort, identifies, categorises and grades garments from images and videos, enabling inventory to be processed digitally before being listed on the company's marketplace.

AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation and matching tools then connect suppliers with buyers globally, while marketplace activity continuously improves inventory classification, pricing and recommendations.

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,

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

According to the company, its platform connects more than 2,000 wholesale suppliers and graders with over 50,000 retailers, resellers and boutiques across more than 100 countries. Fleek says it has helped keep more than 12 million clothing items in circulation while enabling suppliers to recover more value from secondhand inventory and helping buyers source products more efficiently.

The funding will be used to further develop Fleek's AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering team, scale its technology platform and grow its global network of buyers and suppliers.

The company also plans to further develop AI capabilities across inventory processing, merchandising, marketplace operations and buyer discovery as it continues to expand its platform.