‘People can go from zero to 100’: How Gen Z is raking in $260,000 per month on a livestream auction app

Tilt wants to turn shopping into a spectacle, and it's working better than anyone expected. The London startup runs a livestream marketplace where sellers auction off sneakers, streetwear, watches, and basically anything else while buyers bid in real time and shout questions into the chat. No static product photos, no scrolling — just a seller holding up a pair of Jordans and a countdown clock doing the rest.

The numbers coming out of this thing are wild for a platform most people in the US and UK haven't heard of yet. Cofounder Neil Shah told Fortune about a 17-year-old who started selling out of his grandmother's bedroom and scaled past $100,000 in monthly sales within a few months. Maddie, a 22-year-old streetwear seller who is deaf and lives with fibromyalgia, went from mid five figures a month to crossing six figures in June. And one unnamed sneaker seller is now pulling in roughly $260,000 a month, according to the company. These aren't outliers Tilt is quietly ignoring — they're the whole marketing strategy.

The idea traces back to the pandemic, when cofounder Abhinavan Thanendran started thinking about how local shops could keep selling while their doors were locked. Livestreaming from inside the store seemed like an obvious workaround at the time. It grew into something much bigger once Tilt launched in 2023, expanding well past retail into trading cards, luxury accessories, beauty products, and even liquidation inventory — think appliances that would otherwise get tossed in a landfill. The auction mechanic turned out to be the real engine, not just a gimmick. Thanendran said he was surprised how much more exciting bidding felt on Tilt compared to old-school eBay auctions, where the drama never quite matched the format's potential.

What separates Tilt from Whatnot, the much bigger US livestream shopping app that's already reached multibillion-dollar valuations, is the AI stitched into the back end. Tilt uses a stack of AI models to scan livestream footage and automatically generate listings — identifying the item, condition, brand, and price without the seller typing a word. Shah says the system gets it right about 90% of the time, and every seller correction feeds back into retraining the models. Turns out the biggest bottleneck to livestream commerce wasn't bidding excitement at all — it was that sellers despise the tedious work of listing items, and Tilt built its entire R&D roadmap around killing that friction.

Tilt has raised about $50 million so far, with Vinted Ventures joining the cap table alongside Balderton, Earlybird, Seedcamp, and TQ Ventures. The founders are betting that livestream auctions won't stay a niche hobby for resellers and collectors — they think video becomes the default shopping interface for everyone, traditional retailers included. That's a big claim for a category that's barely taken hold outside China. But the six-figure success stories piling up on Tilt suggest at least some buyers are already sold on watching commerce happen live rather than clicking through a catalog.