Another Raises $3.8M Seed Round to Reinvent Secondary Inventory

Today, we're announcing that Another has raised $3.8 million in seed funding led by Concrete Rose Capital, with participation from a group of strategic angels with deep roots in retail operations, brand management, and supply chain technology. This funding will accelerate our mission: to give consumer brands intelligent control over their secondary inventory.

We started Another because we kept seeing the same problem at some of the world's most sophisticated brands. They had invested millions in demand planning, inventory management, and supply chain visibility — and yet their secondary inventory remained a black box. Returns sat in warehouses for weeks before anyone decided what to do with them. Overstock moved through informal broker relationships with no price transparency. Sample sales were planned on spreadsheets and executed by whoever had bandwidth that week.

The financial cost was staggering, but the operational cost was even higher: the best merchant teams were spending 20-30% of their time managing inventory they'd already sold once — or thought they'd sold.

Why Secondary Inventory Is Broken

The US retail industry generates over $800 billion in returned merchandise annually. Add overstock, end-of-season carryover, and production samples, and the total secondary inventory market exceeds $1.5 trillion. Despite this scale, the infrastructure for managing it looks almost nothing like the systems brands use for their primary inventory.

Primary inventory benefits from decades of software investment. ERP systems, WMS platforms, demand planning tools, and e-commerce engines give brands real-time visibility into what they have, where it is, and what it's worth. Secondary inventory has none of this. Most brands manage it through a patchwork of:

• Liquidation brokers who offer opaque pricing with no channel visibility
• Off-price retailers who demand deep discounts and impose tight restrictions
• Informal sample sales run out of showrooms or pop-up spaces
• Donation programs that handle ESG optics but recover zero revenue
• Internal employee sales managed manually with minimal tracking

The result is predictable: brands recover 10-25 cents on the dollar for inventory that could return 40-60 cents with smarter channel routing and timing. Over a $50M revenue brand, that gap is worth $2-5M per year.

What Another Does

Another is the intelligent orchestration layer for secondary inventory. We connect to a brand's existing systems — their WMS, ERP, e-commerce platform, and returns processing center — and provide a unified view of all secondary inventory across condition grades, locations, and categories.

From that unified view, our platform does three things:

1. Grades and values inventory automatically using condition data, original cost, current market comps, and brand-specific pricing rules
2. Routes inventory to the optimal channel based on recovery rate targets, brand protection constraints, and channel capacity
3. Executes and tracks across all secondary channels — off-price retail, online resale marketplaces, internal sample sales, B2B liquidation, and donation — with full chain-of-custody visibility

The result is a secondary inventory operation that works like a primary one: with data, controls, and accountability at every step.

About Concrete Rose Capital

We couldn't be more excited to partner with Concrete Rose Capital on this journey. Concrete Rose was founded on the thesis that diverse founding teams are systematically undervalued by the market — and that backing them is both the right thing to do and the right investment thesis.

Beyond the alignment on values, Concrete Rose brings deep expertise in consumer and retail technology. Their portfolio includes some of the most innovative companies in the space, and their network of brand operators and retail executives will be invaluable as we build and scale.

"Another is solving a problem that every consumer brand has but almost no one talks about openly," said a partner at Concrete Rose Capital. "Corina and her team understand the operational complexity here at a depth that only comes from having lived it. The market opportunity is massive, and the timing is right."

The Team Behind Another

I founded Another with a team that has spent careers at the intersection of retail operations and technology. Before starting Another, I spent eight years in inventory and supply chain roles at two of the largest US apparel brands, where I watched the secondary inventory problem compound year after year without a real solution.

Our team combines experience from retail operations (Target, Nordstrom, PVH), supply chain technology (Manhattan Associates, Blue Yonder), and consumer marketplaces (ThredUp, The RealReal, StockX). We've lived this problem from every angle, and we built Another because we knew what a real solution needed to look like.

What's Next

This seed round gives us the runway to do three things:

1. Deepen our core product — specifically our automated grading engine and multi-channel routing logic
2. Expand our brand partnerships — we're currently working with eight brands in apparel, footwear, and home goods, and we're actively onboarding our next cohort
3. Build our channel network — our platform is only as valuable as the channels we connect to, and we're investing heavily in integrations with off-price retailers, online resale platforms, and B2B liquidation marketplaces

If you're a brand operator who has ever stared at a spreadsheet of returned inventory wondering what to do with it, we'd love to talk. And if you're an investor or operator who wants to learn more about what we're building, reach out.

The secondary inventory market is too big, and the problem is too real, to leave unsolved for another decade.