The news: Fleek, a London marketplace for wholesale secondhand clothing, has raised a $25 million Series B. Total funding is now $45 million.
The round: Burda Principal Investments led the round. eBay, FJ Labs and H14 joined as new investors, and Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital and Y Combinator returned. No valuation was disclosed.
Burda was an early investor in Vinted. “We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche,” said Burda's Julian von Eckartsberg.
What Fleek does: Fleek connects about 2,000 secondhand clothing wholesalers, mostly in India, Pakistan and Dubai, with more than 50,000 vintage retailers and resellers.
The trade is still largely manual. Donated clothing from cities like London and New York ships to sorting hubs in South Asia, where workers grade it piece by piece. The sellable items ship back to vintage shops in the US and Europe.
"It travels thousands of miles, gets sorted by hand in a warehouse in Karachi, and finds its way back to a vintage shop in London or New York, if it's lucky," CEO Abhi Arora said.
The product: Fleek’s new tool, Fleek Sort, is a computer vision model trained on four years of the company's transaction data. A grader photographs an item on a phone, and the model identifies the brand, flags defects, and predicts the resale price and how long it will take to sell.
The new money goes to Fleek Sort and the engineering team behind it. ThredUp projects the secondhand market will reach $350 billion by 2028.
