General Manager - India

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