Tilt raises $26 million to build AI tools for live auctions

Why it matters

Tilt's round shows where live-commerce investors are focusing now: not just on livestream demand, but on software that reduces seller work and helps smaller merchants perform like pros.

Abhi Thanendran and Neil Shah's live auction app Tilt has raised $26 million in new funding, Business Insider reported, as the London company tries to make live selling less dependent on influencer-scale audiences and manual listing work.

Tilt was founded in 2021 by Thanendran, Tilt's CEO, and Shah, both former Revolut employees, according to Business Insider. Tilt says buyers choose a category, such as womenswear or trading cards, then scroll through livestream auctions in a feed that resembles short-form video. Sellers show products on camera, while viewers bid and buy in real time.

The round was led by TQ Ventures. Vinted Ventures, the investment arm of secondhand resale platform Vinted, also participated, alongside existing investors Balderton Capital, Earlybird, and Seedcamp, Business Insider reported. Tilt has now raised $50 million to date, according to the article. Tilt did not disclose a valuation in the pitch-deck story.

The seller bottleneck

Thanendran's pitch is not just that live shopping can become more popular in Western markets. It is that the hard part of live commerce is the labor on the seller side: creating listings, describing products, setting prices, keeping an auction moving, and finding buyers outside the live session.

"Live commerce is very hard on the seller, and they have to do a lot of things," Thanendran told Business Insider. "With the AI technology, we can actually take away a lot of those problems."

Tilt says its Snap tool creates an auction listing when a seller holds an item up to the camera. The tool auto-generates product descriptions and suggests pricing in seconds, according to Tilt. Tilt also says it has a copilot that coaches sellers in real time during auctions, an agentic search function that helps buyers find items across live sessions, and AI-generated clips for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts to help sellers market themselves.

That matters because the live-commerce model can look simple to buyers but punishing for sellers without an audience. A seller with a pile of inventory still has to perform, price, moderate, and promote in real time. Tilt's answer is to automate the pre-show and post-show work, then use software prompts during the stream to push more sellers toward a repeatable format.

Competing with platforms that already have the audience

Tilt's cited competitors include TikTok Shop and eBay Live, according to Business Insider. That is the strategic problem embedded in the round: Tilt is trying to build a marketplace in a category where larger platforms already have traffic, payments relationships, and seller tools.

Tilt's counter-position is specialization. Rather than bolt auctions onto a broad social network or marketplace, Tilt is building the buying experience around live auctions and the seller workflow around AI assistance. Thanendran framed the ambition as lowering the barrier to entry. "A big part of Tilt is we want to help anybody start from nothing and become superstars," he told Business Insider.

Tilt makes money mainly by charging fees on the buyer side, with a smaller portion coming from seller-side fees, according to the article. That split is notable: Tilt needs sellers to supply inventory and entertainment, but Tilt's fee structure, as described, puts more of the monetization burden on buyers. If Tilt can make auctions feel fast and scarce enough, buyer fees may be easier to absorb. If not, Tilt will be competing with platforms where shoppers already spend time and may not expect a separate live-auction fee layer.

Thanendran told Business Insider the new capital will go toward more AI-powered products, better discovery, team growth, and expansion into additional European markets and the US. That makes the round less a simple live-shopping bet than a bid to see whether AI can turn live selling from a creator-led craft into a more standardized marketplace operation.