Circular fashion marketplace startup Fleek announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round, with proceeds to be used to develop AI-powered technology enabling the second-hand fashion industry scale to meet growing demand.
Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, London-based Fleek operates a B2B secondhand fashion marketplace and develops AI tools designed to digitize the sourcing, grading and trading of used apparel.
According to the company, the funding comes as demand for secondhand fashion is growing three times faster than traditional apparel, yet the infrastructure powering this $200+ billion industry is manual and fragmented, with the sector still reliant on manual processes, inconsistent grading standards and disconnected networks with little pricing transparency.
The company has developed “Fleek Sort,” a vision-language AI model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions, that helps identify, categorize, grade and merchandise secondhand garments using photographs or video. The platform is currently used by graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai, and in pilots launching in the UK, Europe and the U.S.
The company said that once processed, inventory is automatically listed on the company’s marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation and matching systems connect stock with buyers around the world. Fleek noted that each transaction generates additional data that further refines the platform’s understanding of secondhand inventory, which helps suppliers increase recovery rates, enables buyers to source inventory more efficiently, and reduces clothing waste.
Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Fleek, said:
“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. 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.”
Fleek said that it has connected more than 2,000 suppliers with over 50,000 buyers across more than 100 countries. The company estimates that its platform has helped keep more than 12 million garments in circulation, saving approximately 13 billion liters of water and avoiding 23,000 tons of CO₂ emissions.
According to the company, the new capital will be used to scale its AI engine, expand its additional secondhand supply networks and grow its global marketplace.
The funding round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator, and others.
Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said:
“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.”
