Vinted Ventures Backs Live Auction App Tilt As Recommerce Competition Heats Up
Vinted Ventures has joined a $26 million funding round for live shopping auction app Tilt, giving the secondhand fashion marketplace a strategic foothold in the rapidly growing live commerce space.
The London-based startup was founded in 2021 by former Revolut employees Abhi Thanendran and Neil Shah and has now raised over $50 million to date.
Business Insider reports the latest round was led by TQ Ventures, with Vinted Ventures joining alongside existing investors Balderton Capital, Earlybird, Seedcamp, and others.
Tilt is a live auction app where sellers showcase items in real time as buyers scroll through livestreams and bid or buy during the stream.
AI is baked into every major part of its seller experience, which may appeal to sellers looking to save time, while others may remain skeptical about whether the technology is ready for primetime.
Its Snap tool, for example, automates the process by creating an auction listing with product description and suggested pricing when the seller holds an item up to the camera.
"Live commerce is very hard on the seller, and they have to do a lot of things," cofounder and CEO Thanendran told Business Insider. "With the AI technology, we can actually take away a lot of those problems."
Tilt also offers a seller copilot that provides real-time coaching during livestreams, agentic search to help buyers find items across live sessions, and automated clipping tools that help sellers create short-form content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
That mix of live commerce, C2C selling, social discovery, and AI-assisted listing should sound very familiar to anyone following eBay’s current strategy.
eBay has been putting increasing emphasis on C2C and eBay Live as key growth levers, especially as stagnant active buyer growth and pressure from platforms like Vinted have put more urgency behind its push into fashion and recommerce.
Liz Morton
Tilt’s newest funding round shows Vinted is paying attention too.
Vinted Corporate Development Principal Martijn van Heeswijk told Tech Funding News that Tilt is creating a differentiated live selling experience with strong potential in fashion and beyond.
"At Vinted, our mission is to make second-hand the first choice worldwide. Through Vinted Ventures, we back founders building the next generation of re-commerce. Tilt is creating a genuinely differentiated experience in live selling, a format we believe has strong potential in fashion and beyond, and we are excited to support them on that journey."
Vinted does not charge seller listing or commission fees, instead monetizing through a mandatory buyer protection fee and optional seller upgrades, a model that has put significant pressure on eBay in fashion and other key C2C categories.
For example, eBay dropped selling fees for private sellers in the UK in 2024 and added a Buyer Protection Fee in early 2025.
In the US, eBay has also been testing zero selling fees for select sellers in Fashion, Baby, and Home Decor, categories that overlap with both Vinted’s secondhand fashion strength and the kind of casual C2C inventory eBay appears to be chasing.
Liz Morton
Now Vinted is investing in a company that is taking the recommerce fight into live commerce, a segment that eBay entered in 2022 but was slow to scale up, losing ground to competitors like Whatnot, Poshmark and TikTok Shop.
Tilt is currently active across the UK, Italy, Spain, and Poland, with Tech Funding News reporting the platform has grown eightfold since its 2024 Series A and that buyers spend more than an hour a day on the app, with 70% returning weekly.
That makes this investment worth watching beyond the funding number.
What do you think of Vinted Ventures investing in Tilt and the growing competition around live commerce and recommerce? Let us know in the comments below!
