en.Wedoany.com Reported - London-based startup Fleek has raised $25 million in Series B funding to expand its AI-powered system for sorting, grading, and pricing secondhand clothing. The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator. The company's total funding now stands at $45 million.
Every year, up to 24 billion secondhand items are shipped from donation bins in cities like London, Paris, and New York to sorting and grading centers worldwide. Although the secondhand fashion industry is valued at over $200 billion, its supply chain still relies on manual assessments, inconsistent grading standards, and fragmented trading networks, resulting in extremely low price transparency. Secondhand fashion is growing roughly three times faster than traditional apparel, yet existing infrastructure struggles to keep up with this demand.
Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek operates a B2B marketplace and has built its core AI system, Fleek Sort. Fleek Sort is a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand transaction records collected over the past four years. The model is already deployed at sorting centers in Pakistan, India, and Dubai, with pilot programs launched in the UK, Europe, and the US. By analyzing photos or videos, Fleek Sort can identify, classify, grade, and display clothing, continuously learning from actual sales to improve accuracy. Once processed, inventory is automatically listed on Fleek's marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, and matching systems connect global buyers.
Fleek currently connects over 2,000 verified wholesale suppliers and graders with more than 50,000 retailers, resellers, and boutiques across 100 countries. The company says its platform has helped keep over 12 million items in circulation, saving approximately 13 billion liters of water and avoiding around 23,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
The new funds will be used to build a more AI-native marketplace, expand the engineering team, and grow the supplier and buyer network. Fleek co-founder and CEO Abhi Arora said most people don't understand what happens to a piece of clothing after it's discarded, and the company was founded to build technology and infrastructure for a broken yet booming market. Co-founder and CTO Sanket Agarwal noted that the global secondhand supply chain locks in more data than almost any other market, and they describe Fleek Sort as the first AI specifically trained to read what secondhand inventory is, what it's worth, and who wants it. Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director for Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said the firm previously invested in Vinted when secondhand fashion was still seen as a niche market, and they view Fleek as the infrastructure powering the next generation of fashion.
