This Immigrant Founder Created a Platform That Helps People ‘Be Their Own Boss’ — And Make Up to $260k a Month

Tilt cofounder and CEO Abhi Thanendran likes to point out that none of the 13 people who did $1 million in sales on his live commerce platform last year were influencers — and that is exactly the point. Thanendran created Tilt for people willing to start from nothing, learn the platform and turn a home or small shop into a seven-figure sales channel. 

Thanendran traces his ambition back to a childhood shaped by war and dislocation.

“I’m a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee,” he tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “My family moved and settled in Canada when I was about 8 years old.”  

They landed in a low-income neighborhood in Toronto, where his parents pieced together odd jobs to make ends meet. Both of Thanendran’s parents had been trained as teachers, and he says they gave him a solid educational foundation. That push carried him to the University of Waterloo, where he studied mathematics. 

After university, Thanendran’s first stop was actuarial science, modeling when people would get sick or die. “It’s a very morbid style of job, so I didn’t really enjoy it, but the math was interesting,” he recalls. He pivoted into hedge funds on Wall Street and Bay Street, using math to predict the market while funds traded on top of his models.

He then jumped into tech, joining $115 billion fintech Revolut in London when the company had fewer than 30 people. “I actually met Neil there, day zero on the job…we still sit beside each other, but now in our own company,” he says of his Tilt cofounder, Neil Shah. 

At Revolut, Thanendran rose to head of data and machine learning, building a large team and absorbing one lesson he’d later import directly into Tilt: “We believe that anybody can almost do anything.”

Building Tilt for non-influencers

Thanendran started Tilt with the idea of bringing back the human connection in shopping — and putting it in the hands of people who didn’t already have massive audiences. 

On Tilt, shoppers log into a stream of live auctions and flash sales hosted by sellers. The platform, which launched in 2023, is live in the U.S., UK, Italy and Spain.

The early product focused on independent brands doing live drops of new collections. It did not work. The breakthrough came when Tilt pivoted to live auctions and resale fashion. “The simple metric that showed us that it was working was just the conversion rate,” Thanendran says. “The first stream in which we had live auctions, we saw way more sales in that stream for secondhand stuff than we ever saw for any brand that was doing a flash drop.” 

It was “night and day compared to what the product was before,” he adds. That shift unlocked a different user base: sellers trading in sneakers, watches, collectibles and eventually many more categories. Today, between 1,500 and 2,000 sellers make at least one sale on Tilt each month. 

How 13 people got to $1 million in sales on Tilt

The 13 people who now do more than $1 million in sales a year on Tilt share a common profile: They are young, ambitious and previously unknown. “They want to be their own boss,” Thanendran says. “Tilt wants to help people start from nothing and become superstars.”

One seller, who sells under the name Yorkshire Trainers, is 20 years old and does about $260,000 in monthly sales. Another top seller, Maddie, has fibromyalgia and is deaf. She sells from her room and has reached about $70,000 in sales per month, or $840,000 per year.

“They came to Tilt, they’re homegrown, they’re doing $100,000, north of $200,000 in sales per month,” Thanendran says. What unites them is not audience size but attitude. “They all are very hard workers, and they have their own distinct personalities that their customer base likes,” he adds. Live selling, he stresses, “is not a passive business.”

Thanendran is blunt about the work required to hit seven-figure sales. “You are an entrepreneur, so you need to learn how to source products, how to sell live, how to handle the logistics so you can consistently have good customer trust,” he says. On top of that, sellers have to build a brand around their live persona and keep audiences engaged for hours at a time.

Many of Tilt’s sellers go live daily, juggling commentary, inventory and fulfillment. “It’s very hard,” he says. “To do that every single day for several hours is tiring, and then on top of that, after your stream, you have to package your stuff, ship everything out, answer customer questions.” 

Using AI to make live selling easier

The platform’s job, in Thanendran’s view, is to make that grind sustainable for more people. One tool to help carry out that mission is AI. Tilt’s flagship tool, Snap, automates the hardest parts of live selling. 

“While you’re live, you just hold up any product that you have lying around that you want to sell,” he explains. “You can just hold it up and describe it, and our system will pick up all the details it needs, like brand, size and condition. It’ll create the listing for you in real time, and it’ll run that auction for you in real time.”

The first versions of Snap almost “completely failed” because sellers hated the user experience, Thanendran discloses. 

But after a year of iteration, “Snap is now the most widely adopted AI product on our platform,” he says. The lesson matches his broader advice to founders: “Every single problem has a solution, and your job as a founder is to find what that solution is.”

Competing with giants and advice for founders

Investors inevitably ask how Tilt will compete with TikTok and other incumbents chasing live commerce. Thanendran’s answer is to keep his eye on the user. 

“We don’t really think about competition like that,” he says. “If you want to build one of the world’s leading consumer businesses, you need to just focus on what your customer needs.”

For sellers, Tilt pitches near‑zero fees and tooling that lets them spend more time selling instead of typing. 

For buyers, Thanendran says, Tilt is unusual in that it doesn’t follow the standard marketplace power law, where a tiny fraction of sellers capture most demand. Because Tilt leans into “homegrown” sellers, “many sellers have an opportunity to become big, and buyers are pushed into various different sellers to discover different people,” he says. That broader distribution, he argues, makes the platform both more trustworthy and more fun to browse.

If there’s one principle that Thanendran comes back to while building Tilt, it is persistence. “The absolute most important thing is to never give up,” he says. “Most businesses fail because the founders let their minds wander a little bit. If you have conviction, there’s never a reason to give up.”