If you’ve ever sold a pair of jeans on Vinted or picked up a bargain dress for a fiver, you might not have given much thought to who actually runs the platform. It feels like a community, almost grassroots in spirit. But behind that friendly app interface sits a complicated mix of founders, professional managers, and heavyweight investors.

Unlike Sainsbury’s or Tesco, you won’t find Vinted on the stock market. It’s privately owned, which basically means slices of the company are held by its founders, employees, and—more importantly—big venture capital firms.

The short answer? Vinted was co-founded by Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas in Lithuania back in 2008, but today most of the company belongs to global investors such as TPG, EQT, Accel, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Day-to-day, it’s run by CEO Thomas Plantenga, the Dutch executive credited with turning Vinted into a European tech success story

From a Wardrobe Clear-Out to a Startup

The story starts small: in 2008, Mitkutė was moving house and found herself drowning in unwanted clothes. Her friend Janauskas offered to help by building a basic website to give them away or sell them. It was meant to solve a personal problem, but word spread. Soon the site attracted media attention, and the idea of a peer-to-peer fashion marketplace was born.

The early vision was simple: make it easier (and maybe even fun) for people to declutter while encouraging a more sustainable approach to fashion. It wasn’t polished, but it caught on.

Enter the CEO—and a Controversial Change

Like many startups, Vinted eventually hit a wall. Scaling across countries takes money, infrastructure, and sharper business discipline. By 2016, things looked wobbly enough that investors brought in Thomas Plantenga, first as a consultant, then as CEO.

Plantenga made a bold—and to some users, unwelcome—move: introducing a mandatory buyer protection fee. Vinted had been completely free up until then. The backlash was loud, but the change gave Vinted something it hadn’t had before: a reliable stream of revenue. In hindsight, it’s probably the decision that kept the company alive and made it attractive to the deep-pocketed investors circling Europe’s tech scene.

Who Owns Vinted Now?

Every time Vinted raised a new round of funding, a slice of ownership shifted toward investors. Over time, the balance tipped: the founders now own relatively little compared with the major backers. That’s the usual trade-off—vision and sweat equity in the early days, replaced by venture capital when serious money is needed.

Some of the key players:

• TPG – A huge global private equity firm, and the lead investor in Vinted’s more recent funding rounds. Their backing suggests Vinted isn’t just seen as trendy but as a long-term moneymaker.
• EQT Growth – Focused on scaling European tech companies, EQT’s stake signals confidence in Vinted’s ability to expand into logistics, new markets, and maybe acquisitions.
• Accel – One of the earliest investors. They spotted Vinted’s potential long before it became fashionable to talk about resale platforms.
• Lightspeed Venture Partners – Led the Series E round that pushed Vinted past the magical €1 billion valuation and into “unicorn” territory.
• Others – Insight Partners, Burda, Sprints Capital, Hedosophia—names that rarely mean much to the average seller on Vinted, but collectively they’ve put hundreds of millions into the company.

What About the Founders?

Mitkutė and Janauskas are still part of Vinted’s story, but like many startup founders, they’ve sold portions of their shares along the way. That’s often both personal (who wouldn’t want financial security after years of grind?) and practical (new investors need space at the table).

These days, strategy and execution are firmly in the hands of Plantenga and the management team, with investors watching closely from the boardroom.

Why Stay Private?

Some wonder why Vinted hasn’t floated on a stock exchange. Going public would raise more capital and boost its profile, but it also brings baggage: quarterly earnings pressure, impatient shareholders, constant media scrutiny. By staying private, Vinted can:

• Double down on growth without worrying about short-term profits.
• Reward employees with share options and occasional “secondary” sales.
• Move fast—acquisitions, tech upgrades, even fee changes—without shareholder drama.

In other words, staying private gives them room to breathe.

Final Thoughts

Vinted might feel like a community app built for ordinary people clearing out their wardrobes, but under the hood it’s a serious, investor-backed machine. The Lithuanian founders planted the seed, Plantenga professionalised it, and venture capital turned it into a multi-billion-euro empire.

So, the next time you shift a pair of trainers for £15 on Vinted, you’re also taking part in a much bigger experiment: what happens when local, scrappy ideas meet the global machinery of tech finance.