London-based startup Fleek has raised $25 million to push deeper into an AI-powered supply chain for secondhand fashion, betting that resale's bottleneck is not demand but sourcing infrastructure.

The round, reported by Retail Technology Innovation Hub, positions Fleek to expand technology that connects buyers of used apparel with supply at scale — a segment where grading, lot consistency and fulfilment reliability remain the main commercial frictions.

What does the money fund?

Fleek plans to channel the $25 million into artificial intelligence that automates how secondhand stock is sourced, matched and moved through the chain. For brands, resale platforms and vintage wholesalers, the promise is a supply channel that behaves more like primary sourcing: predictable volumes, machine-assisted cataloguing and shorter lead times than manual rag-sorting relationships allow.

The company is based in London and operates in the business-to-business layer of the secondhand market rather than the consumer-facing resale apps that dominate headlines. That distinction matters for sourcing teams. Fleek's model targets the upstream problem — who aggregates, grades and ships usable secondhand inventory — before product ever reaches a consumer marketplace.

Why does this matter to sourcing professionals?

Secondhand fashion has grown into a volume business, but its supply chain is still largely analogue. Buyers typically work through sorters and graders with uneven quality standards, opaque pricing and limited visibility into what a shipment actually contains until it lands.

An AI layer applied to that flow could change three cost lines:

• Grading accuracy — machine vision applied to condition assessment could cut dispute rates and returns between B2B counterparties.
• Matching efficiency — algorithmic pairing of inventory lots with buyer demand could reduce dead stock for wholesalers.
• Lead time — automated cataloguing compresses the gap between intake and listing, the same dynamic that reshaped off-price sourcing when platforms digitised excess inventory.

None of these outcomes is yet a measured result at Fleek; the $25 million is a bet on execution. Investors are underwriting the technology roadmap, not a proven margin shift in the channel.

Confirmed versus intention

What is confirmed: Fleek is London-based, has closed a $25 million raise, and states the funds will support its AI-powered secondhand supply chain push.

What remains an announced intention: the specific capabilities that capital will deliver, the timelines for deployment, and any figures on throughput, buyer count or revenue. The company has not published capacity or volume metrics alongside the announcement, so sourcing teams evaluating the platform as a channel should treat it as a scaling startup rather than an established vendor.

The competitive context

Fleek is entering a secondhand infrastructure space where several players are racing to industrialise resale supply — from sorting-house automation in Europe to large-scale used-goods marketplaces in South Asia and Africa that export graded apparel. Differentiation will hinge on whether Fleek's AI genuinely improves match rates and grading consistency, or whether it functions primarily as a discovery layer over a supply base that remains manually processed.

The $25 million gives the startup runway to prove the former. If it does, secondhand sourcing could move closer to the reliability standards procurement teams already expect from first-hand vendors — and that would reshape cost assumptions across the resale channel. The next signal to watch is whether Fleek discloses deployment milestones or throughput data as it deploys the capital.