Fleek raises $25M to scale AI for secondhand fashion

Fleek said it raised $25 million in Series B funding to expand the AI infrastructure behind the global secondhand clothing market. The London startup plans to grow its marketplace, engineering team and buyer-supplier network as resale demand outpaces traditional apparel.

Why it matters: - Fleek is trying to turn a manual, fragmented resale supply chain into software that can scale globally. - The company sits inside a secondhand fashion market worth more than $200 billion, where demand is growing three times faster than traditional apparel. - Fleek says its tools can help suppliers recover more value from inventory, help buyers source faster and reduce clothing waste.

What happened: - Fleek raised $25 million in Series B funding on July 9, 2026. - Burda Principal Investments led the round. - eBay, FJ Labs and H14 also participated. - Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital and Y Combinator joined the round as well. - The London company said the capital will fund AI-native marketplace development, engineering hires, platform scaling and network expansion.

The details: - Fleek was founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal. - The company runs a B2B marketplace and AI systems that digitize secondhand clothing supply chains. - Fleek Sort is the company’s custom vision-language model. - Fleek Sort was trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions from Fleek’s global network over the past four years. - Graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai already use Fleek Sort. - Pilots are launching in the UK, Europe and the US. - The model helps identify, categorize, grade and merchandise garments from photos or videos. - Fleek says the model improves as more inventory is graded, listed and sold. - Inventory processed on the platform is automatically listed on Fleek’s marketplace. - AI systems handle pricing, search, recommendations and matching across the marketplace. - Fleek says each transaction adds data that improves its understanding of secondhand inventory. - The platform connects more than 2,000 verified wholesale suppliers and graders with more than 50,000 retailers, resellers and boutiques across more than 100 countries. - Fleek says it has helped keep more than 12 million items in circulation. - The company estimates that work has saved 13 billion liters of water and avoided 23,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. - Fleek also says it has helped thousands of secondhand and vintage clothing entrepreneurs. - The company is also applying AI across internal operations and product development.

Between the lines: - Fleek is pitching itself as infrastructure, not just a marketplace. - The company’s bet is that the biggest bottleneck in resale is not demand, but the inability to grade, price and route inventory at scale. - Burda Principal Investments’ involvement signals investor interest in repeatable marketplace models in resale, after its earlier backing of Vinted. - The company’s language suggests a broader shift toward using proprietary data to create an edge in secondhand commerce.

What's next: - Fleek plans to keep expanding its global buyer and supplier network. - The company will continue training its models on marketplace activity to improve inventory discovery and matching. - Fleek said new regulations, rising resale demand and growing inventory volumes will make its intelligence layer more important over time. - The company expects AI to play a larger role in internal operations as it scales.