Vinted hits €8B valuation in €880M share sale

Vinted, the Lithuanian peer-to-peer marketplace that has rapidly ascended to become one of Europe’s leading consumer platforms, has just secured an €8 billion valuation (roughly $9.4 billion) via an €880 million secondary share sale. The transaction was spearheaded by EQT Growth, with Schroders Capital and Teachers’ Venture Growth stepping in as new investors, alongside several existing backers.

Crucially, Vinted itself receives no cash from this deal. Instead, the sale provides a liquidity event for early investors and long-tenured employees who are offloading existing shares, rather than the company issuing fresh equity. This €8 billion figure marks a 60% increase from the €5 billion valuation achieved in October 2024, when Vinted completed a similar secondary sale led by TPG and backed by Baillie Gifford.

This two-step progression, both secondary transactions rather than primary fundraising, underscores Vinted’s robust financial health. The company simply does not require new capital. In 2024, it posted €813.4 million in revenue, a 36% year-on-year jump, and €76.7 million in net profit, a staggering 330% surge from the €17.8 million reported in 2023. Gross merchandise value (GMV) across the platform surpassed €10 billion last year. Vinted is profitable, growing rapidly, and its stakeholders are leveraging secondary market sales to realize gains without rushing toward an IPO.

Founded in 2008 in Vilnius by Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas, the company’s origin story is now part of its brand lore: Mitkutė struggled to sell unwanted clothes during a house move, and that friction inspired the platform. Vinted became Lithuania’s first tech unicorn in 2019, backed by heavyweights like Accel, Insight Partners, EQT, Lightspeed, and Sprints. Today, it operates across 22 European countries, boasts over 100 million registered users, and has diversified well beyond second-hand apparel into electronics, books, toys, and video games.

The company’s technological edge is its most formidable competitive barrier. Vinted has integrated Vinted Pay (its own payment system) and Vinted Go (its logistics service) directly into the marketplace, eliminating the friction that plagues C2C commerce on platforms reliant on third-party providers. Its recommendation algorithms match buyers and sellers at a scale that rivals like Depop, Poshmark, and ThredUp have struggled to replicate across multiple European markets simultaneously.

Through Vinted Ventures, its corporate investment arm launched in 2024, the company is backing re-commerce startups with investments ranging from €500,000 to €10 million at Series A to C, extending its influence deeper into the circular economy supply chain.

Vinted has publicly stated it is “IPO-ready” but has set no concrete timetable for a listing. The consecutive secondary sales, from €5 billion in October 2024 to €8 billion now, hint at a deliberate strategy: provide liquidity for early stakeholders and validate the valuation trajectory through institutional market transactions, all while avoiding the disclosure burdens and price volatility of a public listing. This pattern is typical of 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 for this deal is the continued expansion of the circular fashion economy across Europe, fueled by sustainability awareness, cost-of-living pressures, and platform quality improvements that have made second-hand shopping mainstream. Vinted’s GMV exceeding €10 billion in 2024 is the clearest quantitative evidence of that shift. For EQT Growth, which already held a position and is now leading a new secondary transaction at a 60% premium, this deal represents both a vote of confidence 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.