$45M AI STARTUP: What ACTUALLY Happens to the Clothes You Donate | Fleek

In this episode, Sanket sits down with Matt Elsey and Rhys Davies to get into the parts of the second-hand fashion industry nobody sees: where your donated clothes actually end up, why every single vintage item is impossible to catalogue the normal way, and how a vision model can price a garment from one photo. Sanket also explains how Fleek reads TikTok and Instagram to spot micro-trends such as 'fairycore', 'Y2K', 'old money' — before they go viral. The conversation also covers the harder operational stuff: rebuilding a company to be AI-native, the finance problem his team fought for three years and then automated in a month, the "slop" that came with it, token economics and why calling the biggest model every time will quietly wreck a budget, and whether an AI could ever run a company. 🔗 Fleek: https://www.joinfleek.com/home — 🎧 Listen to Agentic Thinkers Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1K41aEJL0gKC4eTyly4mfa?si=7502143c6b364148 🎧 Subscribe for more content: https://www.youtube.com/@AgenticThinkers Get in touch with us: https://agenticthinkers.ai/ — 0:00 Introduction 2:01 From Google Search to second-hand fashion 5:31 The mother-in-law who couldn't get enough stock 8:49 Where your donated clothes actually go 11:35 Why every vintage item is unique 13:39 How AI predicts trends before the runway 16:24 Matching 300,000 buyers and suppliers 18:44 How Fleek starts trends, not just spots them 21:08 FleekSort: pricing a garment from one photo 24:52 Why every company will run its own AI models 28:30 Rebuilding Fleek to be AI-native 31:32 The finance problem three years in the making 33:50 What engineers actually do now 36:33 The junior dev who stopped thinking about code 40:29 Building the company "brain" 44:45 Could an AI run a company? 47:01 Gaslighting, slop, and challenging the model 49:43 Virtual handpicks and the rise of video shopping 57:20 The coming flood of second-hand clothing 1:00:22 Clothes turned back into plastic 1:05:49 Token economics and cost to serve 1:16:47 Why eBay, Shopify and a16z backed Fleek 1:23:01 Advice for founders: stay curious - #SecondhandFashion #VintageFashion #Reselling #AI…