A London-based live auction startup, which uses AI to help match buyers with relevant streams, said it has secured $26 million in funding, as younger generations drive the adoption of live commerce.
Tilt said in a statement on Tuesday that the latest round of funding included backing from Vinted Ventures, the investment arm of the online shopping platform Vinted, marking Tilt’s first strategic investor in the secondhand market. This brought the total funding raised to $50 million.
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The company, founded in 2021, said it would use the capital to accelerate its AI roadmap, scale its team, and expand to new markets. The app is currently live across the U.K., Italy, Spain and Poland. It said it is the only major live commerce platform still operating at scale in Europe.
“The next generation won’t browse static listings the way their parents did—they’ll discover and buy through video, conversation, and live interaction, across every category,” said Abhi Thanendran, CEO and co-founder of Tilt, in a statement.
“What Vinted did for secondhand, Tilt is doing for live. Their backing is the strongest possible signal that this is where the category is going next—and beyond the capital, we’ll be drawing on Vinted’s operational expertise and learnings as we scale,” he added.
The platform enables sellers to go live, with AI helping match buyers to relevant streams in real time. Transactions often beginning through direct interaction, the company said.
One of its features is an AI tool it announced last April called “Snap,” which can automatically create product listings from live video in under one second.
“By watching and listening to streams in real time, Snap automatically creates higher quality product listings—including better titles, optimized descriptions, and more accurate categories and prices—the moment a seller holds up an item,” the company said previously, claiming a 94.8 percent accuracy.
While the live commerce market in Europe is nowhere as big in Asia, which some estimate to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Tilt is seeing signs of growing consumer interest. It said buyers usually spend over an hour a day on the app, with 70 percent of their gross merchandise value coming from repeat buyers.
