Accessing growth: unpacking our direct secondaries investment in Vinted

​​​​​​Our participation in a new direct share sale carried out by Vinted, the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) second-hand marketplace, exemplifies our focus on seeking out high-quality, sought-after growth assets in the expanding market for private equity secondaries.

Founded in Vilnius in 2008, Vinted has grown to become Lithuania’s first unicorn company and established itself as one of the largest marketplaces in the world, employing more than 2,000 staff across Europe. The firm reported revenues of EUR 1.1 billion in 2025 – a 38% year-on-year increase – with net profit of EUR 62 million³. This expansion was driven by strong performance in newly launched categories beyond second-hand fashion and the company’s ongoing roll-out of the integrated Vinted Go carrier service and Vinted Pay wallet solution. 

Having closed a share sale of EUR 340 mn in 2024, the company completed another secondary round worth EUR 880 mn in April. This places Vinted’s current equity valuation at EUR 8 bn². This sale was led by existing investor EQT and featured a number of new investors, including LOIM. As well as strengthening and broadening the investor base, the transaction provides liquidity to long-standing shareholders and rewards employees – a hallmark of direct, or ‘company-led’, secondaries transactions.

An ‘active mindset’ for identifying secondary opportunities

LOIM’s participation in this attractive, oversubscribed deal was driven by a number of factors, including: our experience as secondaries specialists since 2009, the transactional capabilities which make us a constructive counterparty in liquidity windows, and what we call an ‘active investor’ mindset.

We believe the key distinction between investment approaches in this market is not necessarily between primary and secondary investors, but between those that are active and passive. Primary investors can be somewhat passive, for example, if their strategy is centred on taking co-investment roles alongside General Partners. Conversely, an active investor engages directly with company management teams to understand assets and establish investment views independently, which is sine qua non for operating in the world of direct secondaries like the Vinted share sale.

Further, within the team, we have direct operational experience in the ecommerce sector. This enabled us to quickly assess the opportunity, perform underwriting, build solid conviction and revert to Vinted swiftly. In addition, LOIM’s public-equity trading desks have the capacity to support Vinted should it seek a stock-market listing at a future date.

As active investors, we leverage highly developed sourcing networks and the reach of Lombard Odier’s own private-assets platform – which covers private-equity disciplines from the venture and growth stages to buyout – to benefit from best-in-class access to leading companies, not just in Europe but all over the world.

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Private equity secondaries: growth drivers, transaction types and a differentiated approach

February 13, 2026

Vinted¹: proven growth model in an expanding market

As an established and successful growth asset, Vinted is an attractive fit for our latest secondaries vintage. The firm is Europe’s leading second-hand fashion marketplace and its total addressable market is virtually infinite: while its initial focus was fashion, it has now expanded into areas such as homewares, electronics and video games. Its potential for growth is simply a function of the diversity of consumer appetites and the secular rise of second-hand purchasing.

In our view, Vinted benefits from having unlocked a powerful two-sided marketplace flywheel that drives significant network effects – increases in the number of sellers improve the buyer experience, while subsequent growth in buyers make the platform more attractive for new sellers given exceptionally high liquidity levels. This creates sticky cohorts of customers.

Supporting its competitive position are Vinted Go and Vinted Pay, which enhance shipping and payments, respectively. Combined with the Vinted Marketplace itself, these vertically integrated services have created an ecosystem that generates structural cost advantages and has the capacity to deliver future monetisation opportunities. By reducing shipping and payment expenses in this way, Vinted is able to reduce transaction costs and maintain low member fees – leading to higher activity levels, improved sell-through rates and excellent short-term liquidity.

Meanwhile, the company’s high-calibre, data-driven leadership team – supported by respected institutional investors – has an impressive track record of disciplined capital allocation and strong execution. This has enabled Vinted to successfully pursue an ambitious growth strategy while safeguarding its financial resilience. 

Read also: Harnessing private markets to invest in structural shifts: LOIM’s approach

An ‘asset-centric’ mindset for capitalising on an expanding opportunity set

In seeking opportunities across the secondaries market, we believe in applying an asset-centric mindset to find sources of value, regardless of whether a transaction originates from a General Partner (GP-led), Limited Partner (LP-led), or a direct, company-led deal⁴ like the investment in Vinted. This empowers our hybrid approach to secondaries (see the box below for further information).

It is common for secondaries investors to concentrate on access routes, and assess transactions with a focus on headline NAV discounts or the valuations implied by recent funding rounds. In contrast, our priority is always the analysis of the fundamental quality of the assets and their intrinsic value.

To perform this exercise, we aim to achieve a genuine information advantage, seeking data and insights through our sourcing networks, the Lombard Odier private assets platform, industry experts and, as active investors, company management teams themselves.
 

Are growth assets always riskier than buyouts?

The traditional view of secondary investing tends to classify late-stage growth assets as riskier than buyouts, which are generally seen as having more defensive characteristics. We believe this dichotomy is overly simplistic given some secular trends in the growth market, such as large assets staying private for longer.

Take, for example, a company that has a considerable amount of cash on its balance sheet, no debt, annual growth in excess of 30% and which is close to being profitable. In our view, such a business is likely to be “less risky” than a mature buyout target that has undergone significant turns of leverage, changes in management teams, or M&A integrations. Our hybrid strategy seeks a diversified portfolio combining buyout assets, which bring visibility and relative resilience, with later-stage growth assets that are either profitable – or very close to it – and which offer greater upside potential.

For us, Vinted epitomises the latter category. It is a scaled and highly profitable firm that is a leader in a market with immense growth potential. This position, strengthened by its shipping and payments solutions, underpins our conviction in the company to generate a highly attractive risk-adjusted return profile. We are excited for our investors to be part of the firm’s growth journey and we are immensely grateful to Vinted for their trust. We look forward to partnering with the company in private markets and beyond.