Second-hand fashion startup Gently raises $2 million in funds

Gently announced on Monday it has successfully raised $2 million, in a pre-seed funding round composed of more than 20 angel investors and venture capitalists.

The investor pool included Jason Calacanis’ Launch, Austen Allred (Bloom Tech), Jon Oringer (Shutterstock), and Peter Rahal (RXBar), as well as venture capitalists, Dorm Room Fund and V1VC.

Dubbed the 'Amazon of second-hand', Gently is an aggregator shopping platform that allows users to shop second-hand marketplaces Poshmark, Depop, Ebay and more, in one place. Users can search, filter, and get alerts from the biggest second-hand clothing sites, saving shoppers hours per week of searching, and thousands of dollars on second-hand clothing per year.

The platform is a free service for shoppers, with Gently taking a small cut of the sales generated on its marketplace, from its partner platforms. Today, Gently counts Ebay, ThredUp, Vestiaire Collective, Rebag, Grailed, GOAT, StockX, and TheLuxuryCloset as partners.

“I wasted hours searching across all these different secondhand sites and digging through irrelevant results," said co-founder, Samuel Spitz, who started the company in March 2021, with college friend, Kunal Rai, after spending years as an avid second-hand clothes shopper.

"We want to make secondhand shopping as easy as shopping on Amazon,” Spitz added.

Gently soon garnered thousands of users in its first two months of operation, which lead to its most recent cash injection by investors.

The platform today boasts 10,000 users and plans to grow to and to 1 million shoppers by 2024. Over the next few years, the company also hopes to expand from fashion to other categories like furniture, and use machine learning to improve the search experience.

The second-hand fashion market grew 32% in 2021, according to ThredUp.

Second-hand fashion startup Gently raises $2 million in funds

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