London Startup Fleek Raised $25 Million for AI in the Secondhand Market

London-based startup Fleek, which builds software infrastructure for global secondhand clothing trade, has raised $25 million in a Series B round to scale AI used for sorting, assessing condition, and pricing incoming clothing. The round brings the company's total funding to $45 million.

What Fleek Does

Fleek describes itself as a company building "software plumbing" behind global secondhand clothing trade: infrastructure that processes huge volumes of secondhand goods coming from private sellers and textile recyclers. The key part of this infrastructure is AI that handles the routine and labor-intensive part of the process: sorting items, assessing their condition, and determining prices for subsequent resale. Essentially, the company sells not an application for the end buyer, but a tool for those who process and resell clothing at industrial scale.

• Round — Series B for $25 million
• Total funding raised by the company — $45 million
• Round led by Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in Vinted
• Company is based in London
• Round goal — scaling AI for sorting, assessing condition, and pricing clothing

Why Investors Are Betting on This Market

The fact that Burda Principal Investments — one of the early investors in Lithuanian clothing resale platform Vinted — led the round indicates growing venture capital interest in infrastructure around the secondary clothing market as a whole. Manual sorting and assessment of huge volumes of secondhand goods is a labor-intensive and slow process: each item must be inspected, its condition determined, category assigned, and an appropriate price set before it goes to sale or recycling. Fleek's technology is aimed precisely at automating this bottleneck — it promises to do the same thing faster and with fewer people at the conveyor.

Why

Such Infrastructure Is More Profitable Than Direct Consumer Apps

Venture funds in recent years increasingly invest not in yet another consumer app for clothing resale, but in the infrastructure layer behind the market — where the real bottleneck of the entire industry is solved. For resale platforms, sorting centers, and textile recyclers, the speed and accuracy of product assessment directly determine business economics: the faster an item moves from intake to shelf or export batch, the lower storage and logistics costs.

What This Means

Fleek's round is yet another example of how venture investment goes not into consumer apps for clothing resale directly, but into behind-the-scenes AI infrastructure that makes secondhand trading itself faster and cheaper at scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much total funding has Fleek raised?

After the Series B round of $25 million, Fleek's total funding reached $45 million.

Who led the Series B round?

The round was led by Burda Principal Investments — a fund known as one of the early investors in Vinted, a clothing resale platform.