London-based circular fashion marketplace startup Fleek has raised $25 million (approximately €21 million) in a Series B funding round to develop AI-powered technology enabling the secondhand fashion industry to scale operations and meet growing global demand for pre-owned apparel.

As reported by ESG Today, the round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, and Y Combinator. Proceeds will be used to scale Fleek's AI engine, expand secondhand supply networks, and grow its global marketplace.

Sanket Agarwal, Co-Founder and CTO of Fleek, said: "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. Every transaction improves that understanding, creating an intelligence layer we believe will become critical infrastructure for the future of the industry."

Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said: "From its growing supplier network to the technology behind it, Fleek is building the infrastructure the next generation of fashion will rely on."

Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Agarwal, Fleek operates a B2B secondhand fashion marketplace and has developed Fleek Sort, a vision-language AI model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions to identify, categorise, grade, and merchandise used garments using photographs or video. Once processed, inventory is automatically listed on the marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, and matching systems connect stock with buyers globally. The platform currently operates in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India, and Dubai, with pilots underway in the UK, Europe, and the United States.

The funding arrives as demand for secondhand fashion grows three times faster than traditional apparel, yet the sector remains reliant on manual processes, inconsistent grading standards, and disconnected networks with limited pricing transparency across a market estimated to exceed $200 billion globally.

Fleek said its platform has connected more than 2,000 suppliers with over 50,000 buyers across more than 100 countries, helped keep more than 12 million garments in circulation, saved approximately 13 billion litres of water, and avoided an estimated 23,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions to date.