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.