Fleek Raises $25M Series B to Scale AI Platform for Global Secondhand Fashion Supply Chain

London-based startup founded by Indian entrepreneurs plans to expand its AI-native marketplace and engineering capabilities as demand grows for digital infrastructure in the global resale industry.

Fleek, a London-based AI startup founded by Indian entrepreneurs Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, has raised $25 million in Series B funding to expand its AI platform for the global secondhand clothing industry, as investors increasingly back technologies aimed at modernizing one of retail’s largest yet least digitized supply chains. The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early investor in European resale platform Vinted, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14, and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator. The latest investment brings Fleek’s total funding to $45 million.

The company said it will use the capital to accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand engineering teams, scale its technology platform, and grow its global network of buyers and suppliers. The funding comes as the secondhand apparel market continues to expand, driven by rising consumer demand for resale and circular fashion. While the global secondhand clothing industry is estimated to exceed $200 billion, much of its underlying supply chain continues to rely on manual garment grading, fragmented trading networks, and offline processes despite handling as many as 24 billion secondhand items annually.

AI Targets a Fragmented Global Supply Chain

Founded in 2021, Fleek operates a business-to-business marketplace designed to connect wholesale suppliers, textile graders, retailers, and resellers. Alongside its marketplace, the company has developed proprietary AI systems aimed at digitizing how secondhand inventory is identified, graded, priced, and traded.

Its flagship technology, Fleek Sort, is a vision-language model trained on millions of marketplace transactions generated across the company’s network over the past four years. The system enables suppliers to identify garments, assess quality, categorize inventory, and generate merchandising information from photographs or videos captured using smartphones.

According to the company, the platform is already being used in textile sorting centers across India, Pakistan, and Dubai, while pilot deployments are underway in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States.

Once inventory is processed, garments are automatically listed on Fleek’s marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation, and matching systems connect inventory with buyers worldwide. As more transactions take place, the models continue learning from marketplace activity, improving pricing accuracy and inventory discovery.

Today, Fleek says its platform connects more than 2,000 verified suppliers and graders with over 50,000 retailers, resellers, and boutiques across 100 countries. Since launching, the company estimates it has helped keep more than 12 million garments in circulation, saving approximately 13 billion liters of water and avoiding 23,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

India Shapes Product Development

Although headquartered in London, Fleek has built much of its operational footprint around South Asia, where a significant share of the world’s donated clothing is sorted before re-entering international resale markets.

While conversing with AsiaTechDaily, Abhi Arora, Co-founder and CEO of Fleek, said India has become central to the company’s product development because of its role within the global textile supply chain.

“India sits at the centre of the global secondhand supply chain. A significant proportion of the world’s donated clothing is sorted, graded and prepared for resale in South Asia, so if you want to understand how the industry really works, that’s where you have to be. There’s also a personal connection. I’m originally from Calcutta; Sanket is from Jaipur and we have offices in Bangalore and Delhi. We’ve always built Fleek as a global company, but we’ve been able to combine deep local understanding of how these supply chains operate with technology developed for a global market.

Working closely with suppliers and graders in India has shaped almost every product decision we’ve made. Rather than building AI in isolation, we’ve developed it alongside the people doing this work every day. That means our models are trained on real-world workflows and solve problems that actually exist inside sorting centres, making the technology much more practical and effective.”

His comments reflect a broader trend in enterprise AI development, where companies are increasingly training specialized models using operational workflows rather than adapting generic AI tools to industry-specific tasks.

Investors Bet on Resale Infrastructure

The latest funding underscores growing investor interest in infrastructure companies supporting the circular economy rather than consumer-facing resale platforms alone.

“Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it,” Arora said in the funding announcement. “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.”

For Burda Principal Investments, Fleek represents an opportunity to build foundational technology for an industry experiencing sustained growth.

“We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche,” said Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments. “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.”

Fleek’s latest funding reflects a broader shift taking place across global commerce, where artificial intelligence is increasingly being applied to modernize complex industrial workflows rather than simply enhance consumer experiences.

For the secondhand apparel industry, the challenge extends beyond growing resale demand. Scaling the market will require digital infrastructure capable of standardizing inventory, improving transparency, and connecting fragmented global supply chains. By combining marketplace data with specialized AI models trained alongside operators in major textile hubs such as India, Fleek is positioning itself to address that gap as the circular economy continues to expand.

Quick Takeaways

• Fleek has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $45 million.
• The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, H14, and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator.
• The company operates a B2B marketplace connecting 2,000+ suppliers and graders with 50,000+ buyers across 100+ countries.
• Fleek’s AI technology is already deployed in textile sorting centers across India, Pakistan, and Dubai, with pilots underway in Europe, the UK, and the US.
• Speaking with AsiaTechDaily, CEO Abhi Arora said India has played a critical role in shaping the company’s AI models by embedding them into real-world sorting workflows.