Minimist, a Vienna-based technology startup building an AI-powered listing engine for second-hand retailers, has closed a €1 million pre-Seed round to be the invisible backbone of global resale.
The round was led by Tilia Impact Ventures (with support from InvestEU), with participation from angel investors and family offices. It was also supported by a Wien Lebensqualität grant from Wirtschaftsagentur Wien.
“Properly re-inventing inventory management and eCommerce for a circular economy is so unbelievably necessary for us all to meet climate goals, and we’re over the moon to oversubscribe on this round, as we now have the necessary resources to unlock even more value for our customers and customers-to-be, worldwide,” Stephan Hofmann, CEO of Minimist.
Founded in 2024, Minimist is on a mission to make second-hand shopping indistinguishable from buying new. It provides an AI-powered “co-pilot for selling” that allows retailers to digitise unique items in under 30 seconds.
According to the company, the global second-hand market is valued at hundreds of billions, yet 93% of its inventory never appears online. It explains that the issue is not due to a lack of demand, but because the expense of manually photographing, describing, and pricing millions of unique items makes it economically unfeasible on a large scale.
The Austrian startup claims to solve this issue. Its AI-powered listing engine transforms a single product photo into a complete, marketplace-ready listing in under 30 seconds, helping more pre-loved products reach a wider audience.
“We invested because Minimist is addressing a real bottleneck in resale: turning large volumes of unique second-hand items into sellable online inventory. Today, huge amounts of clothing never make it to market simply because the process of processing and listing them is too manual. By removing that friction with AI, Minimist can help extend the life of garments (and more), and reduce waste in a sector that produces over 100 billion items each year,” said Andrew Gray, GP at Tilia VC
The listing includes all essential product details (like size, price, condition, description, etc.), enabling retailers to publish to channels like eBay, Shopify, and Ricardo 10x faster than manual entry. Its app functions as a pricing research tool, assisting users’ shopping and e-commerce teams in pricing more accurately.
It reports that its customers have created 150,000 listings using the app, saving them 17,000 hours of manual effort.
The company is led by Stephan Hofmann (CEO), Robert Andrei Damian (CTO), and Anna Greil (COO). With a team of six people across six countries, the startup primarily makes its sales outside Austria. It has onboarded 15 online customers, including Helen & Douglas House (UK), VinoKilo (DE/CH), and Diakonia (DE).
In January 2025, Minimist raised €350k in a pre-Seed funding round supported by notable investors such as Hanno Lippitsch (founder of Eversports), Michael Pötscher (CMO of Bitpanda, TourRadar, and Paysafe), and Matthias Heimbeck (founder of e-commerce firm Findologic)
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/03/vienna-based-minimist-closes-e1-million-pre-seed-to-power-secondhand-retail-with-ai/
