Building the Pipes for the Circular Economy
In 2012, Krzysztof Marzec co-founded a platform called Yerdle that let people give things away for free. Not sell. Give. It ran as an app where users exchanged used goods using a virtual currency earned by listing their own stuff. It was a social experiment, a proof of concept, and a data mine. What it discovered was that secondhand demand was enormous, but the infrastructure to serve it at scale for major brands simply didn't exist.
That gap became Trove. By 2016, Yerdle had rebranded, pivoted, and begun building the back-end engine that premium consumer brands could plug their resale programs into without having to build anything themselves. Trade-in logistics. Item grading and condition scoring. Dynamic pricing intelligence. Marketplace infrastructure. Analytics. White-label consumer interfaces. The entire recommerce stack - branded, modular, and enterprise-grade.
Marzec's background explains why the execution was tight. Before Trove, he spent years as a derivatives analyst at Northern Trust and an index team assistant at Morningstar - two roles that train a person to think in systems, probabilities, and pricing signals. He then moved into commodity futures trading at Geneva Trading USA, where he eventually became Head of DTG in Chicago. Running parallel to his co-founding of Trove, he traded commodities for 15 years.
Recommerce is not a trend. It's a fundamental restructuring of how goods move through the economy - from linear to circular, from one owner to many, from landfill to revenue.
Framing the Trove thesis, from company materialsThat dual-track career - commodity markets by day, recommerce platform by co-founding - is less a contradiction than it looks. Both worlds reward the same skill: reading supply and demand signals faster than the market prices them in. Secondhand goods are, in their own way, a futures market. What will a used Patagonia jacket be worth in three months? What's the right clearing price for a condition-graded Lululemon legging? Marzec understood these questions from first principles before "recommerce" was even a Google autocomplete suggestion.
Trove's client list reads like a case study in category-defining brands: Patagonia (Worn Wear), Levi's (SecondHand), Lululemon (Like New), Canada Goose, Michael Kors, Steve Madden, Carhartt, On. These aren't experiments. They're fully operational resale channels generating real revenue. And Trove powers the infrastructure underneath nearly all of them.
The company raised its $30M Series E in August 2023 - the latest in a funding arc that has accumulated $153 million. The following year, Trove acquired Recurate, expanding peer-to-peer resale capabilities. In April 2025, the company took its most ambitious step yet: acquiring reverse.supply, a German company that had built the leading recommerce infrastructure for European brands. The acquisition formally opened Trove's European chapter - and gave Marzec and co. a beachhead for a market that, in sustainability regulation and secondhand culture, may ultimately outpace the U.S.
The company holds Certified B Corporation status, a legal commitment to balance profit with measurable social and environmental benefit. By Trove's own accounting, the platform has processed more than 7 million resale items and avoided more than 5 million kilograms of CO2 equivalent emissions. Those numbers are artifacts of scale - but scale, in Trove's case, was always the plan.