Head of Controllership
About the job
- An accounting qualification such as CA, CCA, or CPA.
- Experience in scaled environments, such as multinational corporations, big tech, or similarly mature operating environments.
- Experience building accounting systems or processes from scratch, not just operating within established ones.
- Early-stage company exposure, even if the role there was not the most senior finance role.
- Strong stakeholder management and the ability to drive change outside the finance team.
- Good judgment on where to add structure versus where to stay lightweight.
- Genuine excitement for building something from scratch inside a fast-growing company.
- Design and establish the accounting processes, controls, and operating rhythm Fleek needs for its next phase of scale.
- Assess existing systems and workflows, identify where they break down, and rebuild them where needed rather than patching around weak foundations.
- Create a cleaner month-end close rhythm across finance and partner teams, including stronger deadlines, accountability, and information flow.
- Work with teams outside finance to improve the quality, timeliness, and consistency of inputs into the accounting process.
- Use experience from larger or more mature organisations to help Fleek build a finance function that is robust without becoming bureaucratic.
- Remote or distributed team experience is a plus.
- Multi-entity experience is a plus.
- A data-driven or product-adjacent mindset is a plus.
Can you help us fix the world's most broken supply chain?
The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments a year. 60% end up in landfill, not because people don't want these clothes, but because the supply chain for getting secondhand fashion from donation to resale is completely offline, manual, and broken.
Fleek is fixing this. Our mission is to make secondhand the first choice. We're building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing trade, through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it
Through Fleek, vintage stores, online resellers, and retail buyers source graded secondhand inventory directly from wholesalers and rag houses across multiple countries. Our key enabler is FleekSort, an AI model fine-tuned on secondhand fashion, that can grade, price, and categorise items with just a photo, turning what has historically been an opaque and manual trade into a structured, searchable, and tradable global inventory layer.
Since 2022, we've saved 9 million items from landfill and tripled in size year-on-year. We've raised ~$50M from a16z, Y Combinator, HV Capital, and others, and have recently closed our Series B. Our advisors and private investors include operators behind Depop, Shopify, and Postmates.
Today, we serve thousands of resellers and retailers across the UK, Europe, and the US. With the secondhand fashion market projected to reach $350B by 2027, Fleek is building the AI-native operational and financial backbone for secondhand commerce globally.
We're looking for people who want to build something that matters, and move fast doing it. Sound good? Keep reading.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Controller to build the next layer of Fleek’s finance function. This is a senior individual contributor role sitting within Finance, focused on creating a scalable controllership foundation in a business that has grown fast and now needs stronger process, rhythm, and control. You’ll work closely with leadership and cross-functional teams to design how accounting should operate as Fleek scales.
Why This Role Stands Out
At most companies, a Controller steps into an established finance function and improves it incrementally. At Fleek, you’ll be doing something much more interesting: building controllership in a company where the business has real scale and complexity, but parts of the accounting operating model still need to be designed from the ground up. In practice, that means you won’t just maintain processes, you’ll challenge them, rebuild them and create the operating cadence the company grows into.
This role is especially compelling for someone who has seen what “good” looks like in a larger or more mature environment, but also knows how to operate in the messiness of an early-stage company. Some systems already exist here. Some may need to be rethought entirely. The opportunity is to bring judgment, structure, and momentum to help establish the finance discipline that underpins the next phase of Fleek’s growth.
What Makes You a Fleek Controller?
Builder Mentality: You don’t just inherit processes, you redesign them when they’re not fit for purpose. You’re excited by the idea of creating a controllership function, not just running one.
Comfortable with Ambiguity: You know how to operate when the company isn’t at zero-to-one, but the finance function partly is. Existing processes don’t intimidate you, even when they need to be torn down and rebuilt.
High Agency: You don’t wait for perfect alignment or clean inputs. You can drive an agenda, create momentum and push important operational changes through the organisation.
Influence Through Credibility: You can create buy-in outside finance, whether that’s around month-end discipline, information flows or better controls. People trust your judgment because it’s practical and grounded.
Scale-Informed: You’ve seen systems and accounting environments at scale, and you know how to apply that pattern recognition without becoming rigid or over-engineered.
What You'll Do
Build the Controllership Foundation: Design and establish the accounting processes, controls, and operating rhythm Fleek needs for its next phase of scale.
Redesign What Doesn’t Work: Assess existing systems and workflows, identify where they break down, and rebuild them where needed rather than patching around weak foundations.
Own the Month-End Operating Cadence: Create a cleaner month-end close rhythm across finance and partner teams, including stronger deadlines, accountability and information flow.
Drive Cross-Functional Discipline: Work with teams outside finance to improve the quality, timeliness, and consistency of inputs into the accounting process.
Bring Scale to an Early-Stage Environment: Use your experience from larger or more mature organisations to help Fleek build a finance function that is robust without becoming bureaucratic.
What You Bring
An accounting qualification such as CA, CCA, or CPA
Experience in scaled environments, such as MNCs, big tech, or similarly mature operating environments
Experience building accounting systems or processes from scratch, not just operating within established ones
Early-stage company exposure, even if your role there was not the most senior finance role
Strong stakeholder management and the ability to drive change outside the finance team
Good judgment on where to add structure versus where to stay lightweight
Remote or distributed team experience is a plus
Multi-entity experience is a plus
A data-driven or product-adjacent mindset is a plus
A genuine excitement for building something from scratch inside a fast-growing company.
Ready to build the infrastructure for the world's fastest-growing fashion economy? If you want to work on genuinely hard problems, with a world-class team, at a company that's tripling annually, we'd love to hear from you.
The Practicalities
Location: London HQ, E1, Spitalfields / Shoreditch
Work model: In Person, with trust based flexibility
Stage: Post-Series B, hyper-growth
Team: 100+ across London, India and Pakistan
Culture: High ownership, non-hierarchical, fast-moving. Founder-led with strong opinions loosely held.
What's In It for You?
Fleek is building the technology infrastructure for a $350 billion market that has never been digitised. Joining now means you'll be part of the team that defines how the secondhand economy works, at scale, globally.
Why people join Fleek
The problem is real: 9 million items saved from landfill since 2022. 17,400 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Your work has tangible, measurable impact.
The AI is genuinely novel: FleekSort is the world's first LLM fine-tuned on secondhand fashion. This isn't a GPT wrapper, it's a proprietary model solving classification problems that don't exist anywhere else.
The growth is exceptional: tripling annually, backed by a16z, Y Combinator, HV Capital and others.
The timing is perfect: EU regulation is mandating the infrastructure Fleek builds. The secondhand market is growing 3x faster than new fashion. You're catching a wave.
You'll have real ownership: 100-person company, no bureaucracy. You'll shape decisions and see the impact of your work immediately.
Benefits
Equity / share options
Pension
Private health benefits
Learning and development budget
Team socials and offsites
Our Values
Five values shape how we work at Fleek:
Dream Big and Disrupt Yourself: Push the most ambitious version of what you're building. Step out of your comfort zone. Nothing is out of reach.
Absolute Ownership: The buck stops with you. Drive initiatives to completion. Experiment, learn, persevere. The job isn't done until the job is done.
Curiosity Leads the Way: Don't accept anything at face value. Ask questions you don't know the answer to. That's how you innovate.
Talk to the Customer: Deeply understand their challenges, motivations, and ambitions. Every decision starts with the customer at the centre.
Embrace Diversity: A global team building for a global supply chain. Bring your authentic self and embrace the diversity of everyone you encounter.
About the company
Fleek operates a global wholesale marketplace for vintage fashion. Buyers range from fashion retailers to boutique owners and vintage enthusiasts, and they connect with verified wholesalers to purchase high-quality, authentic vintage items such as printed sweatshirts, graphic tees, and branded collections from brands like The North Face and Levi's. The platform facilitates direct transactions between buyers and wholesalers through features like live video calls and curated product bundles. Revenue comes from transaction fees and premium listing services for wholesalers. Fleek distinguishes itself by verifying wholesalers, offering curated bundles, and enabling sellers to showcase items to a global audience, helping buyers purchase with confidence and find unique, high-value vintage pieces.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Series B
Total Funding
$60.4M
Headquarters
London, United Kingdom
Founded
2021
Get referred to Fleek
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- July 2026 Series B raised $25 million, extending runway and hiring capacity.
- September 2026 job posts target India GM, category expansion, and engineering growth.
- Google Play says Fleek serves 300,000+ resellers, 1M+ bundles, and scheduled live calls.
What critics are saying
- Manual grading remains dominant in Karachi, Delhi, and Dubai; Fleek must replace entrenched workflows fast.
- Depop, Vinted, and Whatnot can outspend Fleek on supply, logistics, and buyer acquisition.
- If AI pricing misgrades inventory, Fleek loses trust and volume, collapsing its data moat.
What makes Fleek unique
- Fleek Sort uses millions of transactions to grade secondhand inventory from photos.
- Fleek owns the upstream B2B supply chain: 2,000 suppliers and 50,000 buyers.
- Burda, eBay, FJ Labs, a16z, and Y Combinator back its marketplace infrastructure thesis.
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Benefits
- Hybrid Work Options
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
-2%1 year growth
-1%2 year growth
-1%London-based Fleek has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs and H14, bringing total funding to $45 million. The company operates a B2B marketplace connecting over 2,000 wholesale suppliers with more than 50,000 retailers and resellers across 100-plus countries. Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek provides infrastructure for the secondhand clothing industry. Its core technology, Fleek Sort, uses a custom vision-language model trained on millions of transactions to identify, categorise and grade secondhand garments from photographs or video. The platform addresses inefficiencies in a $200-billion-plus industry where up to 24 billion clothing items annually pass through sorting centres in Pakistan, India and Dubai. Fleek says its platform has kept more than 12 million items in circulation.
YC-backed Fleek raises €22 million to build AI infrastructure keeping global secondhand fashion on fleek. July 8, 2026 Fleek, a London-based startup building the AI infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry, today announced it has raised €21.9 million ($25 million) in Series B funding, bringing its total funding amount to €39.4 million ($45 million). The 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 more. Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek, said, "Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it. 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. 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." Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek is building the infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry through a B2B marketplace and the AI systems digitising the supply chain behind it. The company references a study indicating that annually, as many as 24 billion items are transported from donation bins in London, Paris, and New York to textile sorting and grading centres worldwide. It further notes that, despite demand for secondhand fashion growing three times faster than traditional apparel, the infrastructure powering this €175.3+ billion ($200+ billion) industry is manual, fragmented and offline. It highlights that garments are still assessed by hand, graded using inconsistent standards and traded through disconnected networks with little pricing transparency. Without digitalisation, the industry simply cannot scale to meet the demand already in front of it, the UK startup asserts. Fleek claims that it combines a B2B marketplace with proprietary AI systems that help suppliers, graders, retailers and resellers source, process and trade secondhand inventory at scale. 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 highlights that it is evolving into a fully AI-native platform for the global secondhand industry. The company has expanded AI across inventory processing, merchandising, marketplace operations and buyer discovery. It notes that its proprietary models are continuously trained on marketplace activity to improve inventory discovery and transform how secondhand goods are bought and sold at scale. As marketplace activity increases, Fleek's models keep enhancing, making it easier for buyers and sellers to manage the complexities of secondhand inventory. Fleek is also applying AI across its internal operations and product development, helping teams move faster and scale more efficiently as the platform grows. Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said, "We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. 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." The company plans to use this fresh capital to accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering teams, scale its technology platform and grow its global buyer and supplier network. Today, Fleek connects 2,000+ wholesale suppliers and graders with 50,000+ buyers across 100+ countries.
Fleek raises $25M from eBay and Vinted's early backer to rebuild secondhand fashion's supply chain. July 8, 2026 * Fleek, an AI startup working to digitise the secondhand fashion supply chain, has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in Vinted. * This round brings Fleek's total funding to $45 million, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14, Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator. * Fleek's AI model, trained on millions of transactions, can grade and price secondhand clothing from just a smartphone photo. The platform connects over 2,000 suppliers with more than 50,000 buyers in more than 100 countries. A piece of clothing donated in London might travel thousands of miles to a sorting warehouse in Karachi, Dubai, or Delhi, where it is graded, priced, and routed by hand. Up to 24 billion items go through this process each year. Fleek, based in London, wants to use AI to replace manual sorting and has raised $25 million to accelerate the transition. "Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it. 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. 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," says Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek. Why an early Vinted investor is investing in infrastructure. Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted investor since its 2015 Series C round, the marketplace has since reached an €8 billion valuation, as of April 2026, led Fleek's Series B New investors include eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, while Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator returned. The round brings Fleek's total funding to $45 million, up from $20.4 million raised in 2024. Investors are increasingly looking at the infrastructure behind resale marketplaces instead of the marketplaces themselves. Apps like Vinted, Depop, and Whatnot, valued at $11.5 billion as of October 2025, need a steady, accurately priced supply of secondhand goods, and that inventory is still checked by hand today, with inconsistent standards and little pricing transparency. "We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. 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," says Julian von Eckartsberg, Burda's managing director for Europe. How Fleek's grading model works. Fleek was founded in London in 2021 by Arora and Sanket Agarwal, inspired by the difficulty of finding reliable inventory during pandemic-era supply chain disruption. The company, which also has offices in Pakistan and India, built a vision-language model called Fleek Sort, trained on years of secondhand transaction data, that identifies, grades, and prices clothing from a single photo or video. Graders in Pakistan, India, and Dubai already use it, with pilots underway in the UK, Europe, and the US. "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," Agarwal says. Once graded, the items list automatically on Fleek's own marketplace, where AI handles pricing and buyer matching. Fleek says it has no direct competitor focused on wholesale secondhand grading, though it sits upstream of consumer-facing authentication platforms like Vestiaire Collective and GOAT. A related supply-side startup is Finnish Bought, which raised $1.5 million in 2025 to unlock resale inventory sitting unlisted in consumers' inboxes. The unresolved number. Fleek connects more than 2,000 wholesale suppliers and graders with more than 50,000 buyers across more than 100 countries, and says it has kept more than 12 million garments in circulation. The secondhand apparel market is valued at over $200 billion today. The infrastructure side of resale has largely been an afterthought next to the consumer apps built on top of it. Burda's investment suggests investors now see sorting and grading, not the marketplace, as the more defensible thing to own. The open question is whether Fleek can digitise a $200 billion offline industry fast enough to keep pace with the rate at which secondhand clothing continues to enter it.
London-based startup Fleek has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised to £45 million. The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted backer, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14, and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek operates a B2B marketplace for secondhand clothing. The platform uses AI to digitise the supply chain, with its Fleek Sort model identifying, categorising, and grading garments through photographs or videos. The company currently connects over 2,000 verified suppliers with 50,000-plus retailers and resellers across 100-plus countries. The funding will support development of its AI marketplace, expand engineering teams, and grow its global network.
Fleek appoints head of talent. Online wholesale platform Fleek has appointed Matthew Parker as its founding head of talent as it scales its London team. The hire supports the company's growth and its AI-first operating model, with recruitment underway across engineering, product, commercial and operations roles. Matthew will be responsible for building Fleek's people function from the ground up, with a focus on attracting "AI-first operators" who combine commercial thinking, technical expertise and strong execution. He will also lead hiring strategy to support Fleek's technology aimed at modernising the global secondhand fashion supply chain. Matthew said: "People who have used the most advanced tools already think differently about their careers. "They're already asking themselves what their role will look like in two years. "We're giving candidates access to tools like Claude Code during the interview process so we don't exclude people who simply haven't had the opportunity to use them yet. "We want to find the right people, not just the most privileged." The appointment comes as Fleek continues to expand its platform, connecting thousands of resellers worldwide and supporting the growth of the circular fashion economy. Alberto Lo Bue, vice president of growth at Fleek, added: "The fashion industry produces over 100 billion garments a year, and around 60 per cent end up in landfill, not because people don't want these clothes, but because the infrastructure that moves secondhand fashion from donation to resale is still largely offline. "Fleek is fixing this." "The real skill is recognising when AI output is good enough versus when it's confidently wrong. "That analytical rigour is what separates exceptional operators." "AI is splitting the analyst role in two. "Execution is being automated, while problem framing, interpretation and decision support are becoming even more important." Co-founder Sanket Agarwal added: "In an AI-native world, internal operations become a collection of agents and tools with humans in the loop. "Our teams are already building internal tools connected to our data in minutes rather than waiting on engineering." Want your business, product or service to be seen regionally and nationally? Bdaily helps you get your story in front of the right audience, every day. Find out how Bdaily can help Join more than 55,000 subscribers by signing up to our daily bulletin each morning here. Explore these topics. Enjoy the read? Get Bdaily delivered. * Occasional offers & updates from selected Bdaily partners