Think about the last thing you dropped into a charity bag. Where did it go?
Honest answer: you have no idea. Neither does almost anyone. The garment left your flat and entered a system so large and so undocumented that it may as well have gone into the sea.
What actually happens is this. Up to 24 billion items of clothing a year travel from donation bins in London, Paris and New York to sorting and grading centres in Pakistan, India, Dubai and elsewhere, where they are identified, graded and priced by hand. Millions get mispriced. Millions never make it back into circulation at all.
A London company called Fleek has just raised $25 million to teach AI to do that job properly.
Credit: Fleek
The Money
Fleek announced a $25m Series B led by Burda Principal Investments – an early Vinted backer and lead investor in its Series C – with participation from eBay, FJ Labs and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital and Y Combinator.
That brings total funding to $45m. The list of names is the tell: this is the resale establishment betting that the pipes matter more than the shopfront. “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,” said Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, on why they wrote the cheque.
What Fleek Actually Is
Fleek is not a place you shop. It’s the infrastructure behind the places you shop.
Founded in London in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, it runs a B2B marketplace connecting more than 2,000 verified wholesale suppliers and graders with more than 50,000 retailers, resellers and boutiques across 100+ countries — many of them people making a living selling on Vinted, Depop and Whatnot.
Credit: Fleek
At the centre sits Fleek Sort, a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions over four years. It identifies, categorises, grades and merchandises secondhand garments from a photograph or video. It’s already in use by graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai, with pilots launching in the UK, Europe and the US.
Every transaction feeds back in. The more inventory that moves through, the better the model gets at knowing what a thing is and what it’s worth.
The Numbers Behind The Numbers
Demand for secondhand fashion is growing three times faster than traditional apparel. The industry is worth $200+ billion. And it is, in Fleek’s description, “manual, fragmented and offline” – garments assessed by hand, graded to inconsistent standards, traded through disconnected networks with almost no pricing transparency.
Fleek says its platform has kept more than 12 million items in circulation, saving an estimated 13 billion litres of water and avoiding 23,000 tonnes of CO₂.
Credit: Fleek
Those are company figures rather than independently audited ones, and resale sustainability maths is notoriously generous – but the directional point stands. An item correctly identified and priced sells. An item mispriced sits in a warehouse and eventually becomes waste.
What The Founders Say
Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO, explained “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.”
“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,” said Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO, on the data, “Every transaction improves that understanding, creating an intelligence layer we believe will become critical infrastructure for the future of the industry.”
Why We Care
Because the vintage seller you buy from on Depop is running a business on guesswork, and this is the thing that stops that.
If you’ve ever wondered how a reseller sources a rail of nineties Levi’s, the answer is that they buy bales – sight largely unseen – from wholesalers, and hope. Better identification and pricing at the sorting stage means fewer duds in the bale, better margins for small sellers, and less clothing quietly written off.
There’s a less comfortable read available too. Automating the grading of secondhand clothes touches an enormous manual workforce in the countries where that sorting happens, and neither the funding announcement nor the company says much about what that transition looks like for the people currently doing the work. Worth watching.
But the broader shift is real, and it’s one we keep seeing in fashion tech: the money is moving from the pretty front end to the deeply unglamorous machinery underneath. Whering digitised your wardrobe. Fleek is digitising what happens after you empty it.
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