Tilt’s $26M raise, the first Vinted Ventures cheque into a live-commerce platform, looks like a defensive move against the Whatnot expansion threatening Vinted’s European resale base.
Tilt, the London-based live-auction app founded by two early Revolut employees, has raised $26m in fresh funding with Vinted Ventures joining as a new investor alongside existing backers TQ Ventures, Balderton Capital, Earlybird and Seedcamp.
The raise brings the company’s total funding to over $50m and lands at a moment when the European live-commerce category has shifted from theoretical opportunity to active competitive battleground.
The Vinted Ventures participation is the part worth pausing on. The corporate venture arm of Europe’s largest second-hand marketplace is, on the company’s own framing, looking to back “the next generation of re-commerce.”
Whatnot reached an $11.5bn valuation last year on $6bn in gross merchandise value and 541% download growth. AlixPartners’s own analysis of the resale market identifies Whatnot as a direct threat to Vinted’s asynchronous-listing model. Backing Tilt is the most concrete signal yet that Vinted is choosing to compete in the live-commerce category rather than cede it.
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The Tilt-specific commercial case is stronger than the press release framing suggests. Tilt has grown 8x since its Series A in 2024, with buyers spending over an hour a day on the app, a 70% week-over-week return rate, and 70% of monthly gross merchandise value coming from repeat buyers. The platform is now live in the UK, Italy, Spain and Poland.
The company has built a 60-person team to compete against Whatnot’s much larger operational footprint, and is the only major European live-commerce platform still operating at scale on the continent. The Asian live-commerce market is now worth $370bn-plus by company-cited estimates; the Western analogue is still in early-formation, which is what makes the strategic bet on the category live.
The business model is the structural differentiator. Tilt charges buyers rather than sellers, the same fee-architecture Vinted itself made famous (and which has been the principal driver of its sustained European-market dominance over eBay). S
ellers can therefore launch on Tilt without working capital, which is what has enabled the unusual stories the company highlights in its press materials: a 22-year-old former McDonald’s worker (MX Watches) now turning £50k a month; a Scottish teenager (Leon’s Luxury) approaching £1m lifetime GMV; a 17-year British Army veteran (Vintage by Rachel) who paid off £40k of debt within a year of joining, selling from a caravan.
The seller-economic stories are unusually compelling for a B2B funding announcement, and they are themselves part of the marketing pitch to new live-commerce sellers Tilt is now trying to recruit on the back of the round.
The AI layer Tilt is building inside the platform is the harder-to-evaluate part. The company’s in-house tools include “Snap,” which it says turns a held-up item into a structured listing within seconds; a real-time copilot that supports pricing and responses during streams; agentic search that lets buyers find items across live sessions using natural language; and clip-farming tooling that automatically repurposes stream content into shareable assets.
Each of these is the kind of feature that could plausibly justify the 8x growth claim; collectively they describe the AI-augmented operator a 60-person team needs to be in order to compete with Whatnot’s much larger payroll.
The capital will fund continued AI development, geographic expansion into new markets, and continued team scaling. Founders Abhi Thanendran (CEO, former Revolut data scientist and the company’s data-team lead) and Neil Shah (co-founder, Revolut’s fifth employee) continue to run the business from London.
Tilt has not disclosed valuation, monthly active user count, or specific GMV figures, all of which would matter for any direct competitive read against Whatnot.
What is clear is that the European live-commerce category now has a credible, well-funded local champion with the largest European resale platform behind it. Whether Tilt can hold European share against Whatnot’s US-scale capital base is the next 18 months’ question.
