Highstock, a business-to-business marketplace that helps beauty brands sell surplus inventory to vetted business buyers, has raised a $30 million series A, led by venture capital firm a16z.

As part of the investment, Olivia Moore, AI partner at a16z, will join the board. A16z investor Jeff Jordan is also participating as an adviser. 

AI-powered Highstock’s model involves working with a network of international buyers and live commerce players on channels such as Whatnot and TikTok Live to help brands shift product out of their core markets discreetly. 

In the latter, one of those buyers is The Boyzzz, who then sells the products on Whatnot. They have nearly 170,000 followers and more than 145,000 sales. 

International buyers, which make up 40 percent of the business, include live sellers and retailers.

Of how she came up with the idea, Highstock founder and former Instacart product leader Camille van Horne said: “Before starting Highstock, I was director of product at Instacart. Over the course of my tenure, we would often do visits to major CPGs warehouses and I first encountered the problem of surplus inventory in that context. Toward the end of my tenure at Instacart, I was visiting a major snack manufacturer’s warehouse, and there was literally like an insurmountable amount of snacks that seemed totally, totally sellable en route to what they described as a tank, which is just a nice word to say destruction. And I realized at that point in time the amount of waste there is as a byproduct of brands not having very good options for products that are short dated or obsolete for whatever reason.”

A little over a year later, Highstock now has more than $1 billion in inventory listed on the platform and works with more than 100 major brands. Roughly 60 percent of transaction volume comes from brands and conglomerates that do more than $500 million in annual revenue. 

Beauty brands it has worked with include Laura Geller, Bliss and Versed.

Highstock wants to use the new funding to expand into apparel and fashion categories.

“We’ve been very successful in beauty and personal care,” said van Horne. “Apparel is five times the size of the beauty liquidation market. Waste is built into the system there, where there are seasonal drops. Beauty has a different problem that leads to excess, which is shelf life, so we often work with brands that have products with less than 18 months of shelf life, which is the point at which traditional retailers won’t accept the goods.”