London startup Fleek raises $25M for AI built for the secondhand clothing market

London startup Fleek, which builds software infrastructure for the global secondhand clothing trade, has raised $25 million in a Series B round. The company will use the money to scale the AI it uses to sort incoming clothing, grade its condition, and price it. The round brings Fleek's total funding to $45 million.

What Fleek does

Fleek describes itself as building the "software plumbing" behind the global trade in used clothing: infrastructure that handles huge volumes of secondhand goods coming in from individual sellers and textile recyclers. The core of that infrastructure is AI that takes over the routine, labor-intensive part of the process: sorting items, grading their condition, and pricing them for resale. In short, the company isn't selling an app for end shoppers. It's selling a tool for businesses that process and resell clothing at industrial scale.

• Round: $25 million Series B
• Total funding raised: $45 million
• Lead investor: Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in Vinted
• Headquarters: London
• Purpose of the round: scaling AI for sorting, condition grading, and pricing of clothing

Why investors are betting on this market

Burda Principal Investments, one of the early backers of Lithuanian clothing resale platform Vinted, led the round. That points to growing venture capital interest in the infrastructure around the secondhand clothing market as a whole. Sorting and grading huge volumes of secondhand goods by hand is slow, labor-intensive work: every item has to be inspected and assigned a condition, a category, and a reasonable price before it can be listed for sale or sent for recycling. Fleek's technology targets exactly this bottleneck, promising to do the same work faster and with fewer people on the line.

Why this kind of infrastructure pays off better than a consumer-facing app

In recent years, venture funds have increasingly backed the infrastructure layer behind the market rather than yet another consumer app for reselling clothes. That layer is where the industry's real bottleneck gets solved. For resale platforms, sorting centers, and textile recyclers, the speed and accuracy of item grading directly shape the economics of the business: the faster an item moves from intake to the shelf or an export batch, the less the business spends on storage and logistics.

What it means

Fleek's round is another example of venture money flowing not directly into consumer clothing resale apps, but into behind-the-scenes AI infrastructure that makes the secondhand trade itself faster and cheaper at scale.

FAQ

How much has Fleek raised in total?

After its $25 million Series B, Fleek's total funding has reached $45 million.

Who led the Series B round?

Burda Principal Investments led the round. The fund is known as one of the early investors in clothing resale platform Vinted.