Within eCommerce, secondhand clothing marketplaces have cropped up and become popular with venture capitalists. The latest injection of funding came just a few weeks ago when women’s clothing consignment portal Twice raised an $18.5M round led by Andreessen Horowitz‘s Jeff Jordan.
As mobile commerce becomes increasingly important, the venture-backed companies within the online secondhand clothing space are focusing on getting users to resell and purchase their items via smartphone and tablet devices. Besides Twice, five startups that also operate secondhand clothing marketplace apps are 99dresses, Poshmark, Threadflip, thredUP and Tradesy. ThredUP is the most well-funded of the mix, backed by investors including Trinity Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
With a host of players, we took a look at mobile app store we collect to better understand which venture-backed startups might be picking up momentum in the second-hand clothing/consignment market. Below are a few highlights we gathered from the App Store data in the fast-moving space:
- Unlike several of the other companies that operate both online and mobile, Poshmark launched as a mobile-only women’s secondhand clothing marketplace. And over the past few months, the Mayfield Fund-backed startup has remained ahead of the pack in the App Store rankings and has been in or near the top 100 since October.
- Backed by just a small seed round, 99dresses has made a jump in the rankings in 2014 and now ranks ahead of the most well-funded company in the set ThredUP which saw a fall off in the App Store between November and January.
- Interestingly, Andreessen Horowitz has backed both Threadflip and Twice. Threadflip has trended consistently in the top 200-ranked ‘Lifestyle’ apps over the past few months, but Twice has shot up the rankings since it debuted its dedicated app in November moving from 743 on Nov. 27th to as high as 63 in January in the ‘Lifestyle’ genre.
- Given that A16Z has previously stood by just one company in a given market (see Instagram and Picplz as an example), it looks like A16Z has picked the horse they are betting on in the space. Threadflip which had its last raise 19+ months ago will be one to watch in the coming months. Is its consistent trending in the top 200 going to be enough to garner follow-on investment? The company was rumored to be valued at $20-25 million in its last round of financing which was led by Shasta Ventures. In addition to Shasta and A16Z, it counts First Round Capital, Baseline, Forerunner Ventures and Lowercase Capital among its investors.
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