Tilt.com

Tilt CEO and co-founder James Beshara, a 2008 graduate of Wake Forest University, developed the concept for the group-funding platform while working as a microloans collection officer in South Africa.[12] Beshara utilized the concept of social collateral to create Dvelo.org, which aimed to provide group-funded loans to micro-insurance organizations.[5][13][14] When Dvelo users began to use the service to fund non-charity related ventures, Beshara shifted the company's model to concentrate on raising funds for parties, gifts, events, or any other cause that a user proposed.[4][5][12][13][14]

Beshara brought on Khaled Hussein as a co-founder in 2011.[13] Beshara and Hussein rebranded Dvelo as Crowdtilt and were accepted into the winter 2012 session of Y Combinator.[12][14][15][16][17]

In May 2012, the company closed its first round of funding at $2.1 million.[18][19] Investors included SV Angel, CrunchFund, and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian.[14][18][19]

In November 2012, the company met federal regulations regarding fundraising for nonprofits.[20] As a result, Crowdtilt fully supports charity fundraising, providing users with tax-deductible donation receipts.[19][20][21][22]

In December 2012, the company released a crowd-funding API that allows startups and third-party developers to integrate Crowdtilt's functionality into applications.[22][23][24][25]

In April 2013, the company raised $12 million in Series A financing.[7][24][26] The financing was led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.[7][24][26] This round of financing brought Crowdtilt's total funding to approximately $14 million.[24][27]

On December 16, 2013, the company raised $23 million in Series B funding to help the company continue to grow its team and expand internationally.[28][29]

On July 31, 2014, Crowdtilt rebranded as simply Tilt.[30]

On August 28, 2014, Tilt announced that it was dropping fees for groups looking to collect money.[31] It is now free for organizers to collect money with their groups, and free for all contributors using their debit card for payments (a standard 3% processing fee still applies for credit cards). Previously, Tilt charged collect organizers a 2.5% fee on the total money pooled.[32]

Tilt began a collaboration with ESPN Fantasy Football in August 2014 to provide a safe, secure and simple way for league commissioners to collect ESPN fantasy football league dues.[33]

In 2017, Airbnb acquired Tilt for $12 million in cash as an acqui-hire, since the business was never profitable but had some talented employees.[34][35] Airbnb retired the Tilt platform in June 2017.[11]

Tilt's principal product was a group-funding platform that allowed users to contribute to and create campaigns of their choosing.[4][15][16] Every campaign was assigned a tilt point, which defines the minimum amount of funding needed to make the campaign successful.[4][5] Users could contribute as much as they like, and campaign funds were only released if the tilt point is met.

It was free for organizers to collect money with their groups, and for all contributors using debit cards (a standard 3% processing fee still applied for credit cards).

In December 2012, the company released an application programming interface (API) which allows third-party integration of the Tilt group payment functionality into any application.[23] The API's universal payments interface is compatible with multiple payment processors in any currency.[22][23][25][36]