- Lithuania-based second-hand clothing marketplace company Vinted has raised €128 million in funding at more than a $1 billion valuation
Vinted — a Lithuania-based second-hand clothing marketplace company — announced it raised €128 million in a round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Sprints Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Accel, and Burda Principal Investments, according to TechCrunch. And with this funding round, Vinted is now valued at more than $1 billion, which makes it one of the largest startups in Lithuania.
With this round of funding, Vinted is going to expand further in Europe. And the company is going to build more features on its platform to improve the buying and selling process.
“We want to make sure we don’t have new products,” said Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga in an interview with TechCrunch. “All our sellers are regular people.” Some 75% of Vinted’s customers have never bought or sold second-hand clothes in their lives before coming to the platform, he added. “The stigma is no longer there.”
Milda Mitkute and Justas Janauskas launched Vinted in 2008 based on an idea Mitkute had for clearing out her closet filled of clothes before switching houses. In 2016, the company nearly ran out of money so investors brought in Plantenga to help get the money back on track.
“We changed the business model in 2016 to make the costs as low as possible for users to list clothes,” explained Pantenga via TechCrunch. “That produced a dramatic change in our growth trajectory.”
