Schroders Capital and Teachers’ Venture Growth join as new investors. The transaction gives early investors and long-serving employees a route to liquidity. Vinted says it is ‘IPO-ready’ but has set no timetable. FY2024 revenue grew 36% to €813 million; net profit quadrupled.
Vinted, the Lithuanian second-hand marketplace that has become one of Europe’s largest consumer-to-consumer platforms, has reached a valuation of €8 billion (approximately $9.4 billion) through an €880 million secondary share sale. The transaction was led by EQT Growth, with Schroders Capital and Teachers’ Venture Growth joining as new investors alongside several existing backers.
Vinted itself does not receive any proceeds from the deal; the transaction provides liquidity to early investors and long-serving employees who are selling existing shares rather than the company issuing new ones.
The €8 billion valuation represents a 60% step-up from the €5 billion valuation Vinted achieved in October 2024, when it completed a previous secondary share sale led by TPG and backed by Baillie Gifford.
That two-step progression, both transactions being secondary sales rather than primary fundraising rounds, reflects Vinted’s financial position. The company does not need new capital.
In 2024 it generated €813.4 million in revenue, up 36% year-on-year, and €76.7 million in net profit, a 330% increase from the €17.8 million reported in 2023. Gross merchandise value across the platform exceeded €10 billion in 2024. The company is profitable, growing fast, and its existing investors and employees are using secondary market transactions to realise gains without an IPO.
Vinted was founded in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania, by Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas. The founding story has become part of the company’s brand mythology: Mitkutė wanted to sell clothes she no longer needed during a house move, and the experience of how hard that was prompted the platform.
Vinted became Lithuania’s first tech unicorn in 2019, backed by Accel, Insight Partners, EQT, Lightspeed, and Sprints. It now operates in 22 European countries, has more than 100 million registered users, and has expanded beyond its original second-hand clothing focus into electronics, books, toys, and video games.
Existing backers include Accel, Insight Partners, EQT (which led the current round through its Growth arm), Lightspeed, and Sprints.
The company’s technology infrastructure is the competitive moat that competitors have found hardest to replicate. Vinted’s platform integrates its own payments system (Vinted Pay) and logistics service (Vinted Go) directly into the marketplace, removing the friction that plagues C2C commerce on platforms that rely on third-party payment and shipping providers.
Its recommendation algorithms match buyers and sellers at a scale that Depop, Poshmark, and ThredUp have not been able to match across multiple European markets simultaneously.
Vinted Ventures, its corporate investment arm launched in 2024, is backing re-commerce startups with investments ranging from €500,000 to €10 million at Series A to C, extending the company’s influence into the broader circular economy supply chain.
The company has described itself as “IPO-ready” but has set no public timetable for a listing. The two successive secondary share sales, October 2024 at €5 billion and now April 2026 at €8 billion, suggest a deliberate strategy: provide liquidity to early stakeholders and validate the valuation trajectory through institutional market transactions, without the disclosure obligations and price volatility of a public listing.
The pattern is consistent with companies that are genuinely confident in their growth and want to control the timing of any public event.
CEO Thomas Plantenga has begun testing cross-Atlantic trade routes between London and New York as a preliminary step toward US market entry, describing the American second-hand market as “immature” with significant room for penetration.
An eventual IPO on either side of the Atlantic would benefit from having the US market narrative established before the prospectus is written.
The broader context of the deal is the continued growth of the circular fashion economy across Europe, driven by a combination of sustainability awareness, cost-of-living pressure, and platform quality improvements that have made second-hand purchasing mainstream rather than niche.
Vinted’s GMV exceeding €10 billion in 2024 is the clearest quantitative evidence of that shift. For EQT Growth, which already held a position in Vinted and is now leading a new secondary transaction at a 60% premium to its prior round, the deal represents both a vote of confidence in the trajectory and a platform for participating in any future primary round or IPO at a known entry point.
For Schroders Capital and Teachers’ Venture Growth, both patient, long-duration institutional investors, the secondary entry at €8 billion is a bet that Vinted’s US expansion and continued European dominance will support a meaningfully higher valuation at IPO.
