Tilt, the bold financial services startup founded by Andrew Peek, has raised $7.1 million in Seed funding to advance its mission: to price the world’s information.

Backed by leading Canadian venture firms Golden Ventures and Real Ventures, Tilt is exploring a future where online value isn’t dominated by the blunt instrument of advertising, but by a system that makes information itself tradable, measurable, and valuable in entirely new ways.

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A Mission to Rethink the Web’s Business Model

The internet has been built on advertising for decades. Every click, scroll, and search is captured and sold to advertisers, creating a trillion-dollar economy - but one where users, creators, and even platforms themselves often feel squeezed.

Andrew Peek, Tilt’s founder, believes there’s a better way forward. Instead of monetizing attention, Tilt wants to monetize information directly, creating a market structure where knowledge can be priced, shared, and rewarded without needing to be wrapped in ads.

If successful, Tilt could open the door to an entirely new financial layer for the internet: one where information is both a currency and a commodity, fueling a web that feels more equitable and efficient.

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Breaking Down Tilt’s Approach

Tilt is still early, but its thesis is ambitious:

• Price discovery for information → Just as financial markets price stocks, Tilt aims to price knowledge.
  
• An alternative to ads → Rather than incentivizing clickbait and engagement traps, Tilt could reward high-quality, verified insights.
  
• New income streams → For creators, researchers, and organizations, this model could unlock revenue beyond ads, subscriptions, or sponsorships.
  

This concept puts Tilt at the intersection of financial services, data markets, and the future of the web economy - a sweet spot attracting significant investor interest.

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A Truth Founders Can’t Ignore

One pattern that often separates breakout startups from those that plateau is how they think about incentive alignment. Tilt’s premise - pricing information - hinges on solving the problem of incentives.

What most founders miss is that product design is only half the battle. The other half is designing incentives that get every stakeholder - users, contributors, and even competitors - pulling in the same direction.

When incentives misalign, platforms collapse under spam, misuse, or distrust (think of how early social media devolved into engagement-driven chaos). When they align, platforms compound value at massive scale (think of how Stripe aligned developers, businesses, and financial institutions).

For founders, the question isn’t just “what does my product do?” but “what do the incentives push people to do over time?” Get that right, and you build not just a product, but an economy around your product. That economy is what investors pay premiums for.

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Why Tilt’s Vision Matters Now

The timing for Tilt’s funding is notable. The global information services market is projected to reach $400 billion by 2030 (Statista), fueled by the demand for data analytics, research, and real-time insights. Meanwhile, the digital advertising industry - currently valued at over $740 billion globally (eMarketer, 2025) - faces increasing backlash over privacy concerns, inefficiency, and user fatigue.

Several forces are converging:

• AI-driven data: As AI systems require vast datasets, there’s growing pressure to assign value to the data being consumed and created.
  
• Privacy regulations: With GDPR, CCPA, and new global data rules, advertising’s ability to target users effectively is weakening.
  
• Creator economy shifts: Over 200 million people now identify as creators globally (Linktree Creator Economy Report, 2025), yet monetization remains limited to ads, brand deals, or subscriptions. Tilt offers a new rail for monetization.
  
• Financialization of everything: From carbon credits to fractional real estate, markets are being built around assets once considered untradeable. Information may be next.
  

Tilt’s $7.1M raise signals that investors see real potential in this new category - pricing knowledge itself.

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Investors Betting on the Future

The round was led by Golden Ventures (Toronto) and Real Ventures (Montreal), two firms known for backing ambitious Canadian startups with global reach. Both have track records of spotting opportunities in fintech and infrastructure plays that rewire core systems.

With their support, Tilt will invest in platform development, data modeling, and early partnerships. Expect them to test use cases in areas like market research, expert insights, and creator monetization, before scaling to broader applications.

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The Road Ahead

Building a market for information is no small feat. Challenges include:

• Trust and verification → How do you ensure priced information is accurate and not manipulated?
  
• Liquidity → Can Tilt generate enough supply and demand to keep markets active?
  
• Adoption → Will creators and organizations embrace an alternative model to ads?
  

But if Tilt succeeds, the upside is enormous. Pricing information could reshape how the web operates, providing a path beyond the ad-driven economy and offering users and creators a system that better reflects the true value of knowledge.

As Andrew Peek has put it: “I genuinely believe there’s a better business model for the web.” Tilt’s funding gives him the runway to prove it.

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Industry Outlook: The Value of Information

Globally, the data economy is growing at double-digit rates, with McKinsey estimating that data-driven business models could add $3 trillion to $5 trillion annually to the global economy by 2030. Yet most of this value accrues to a handful of tech giants who aggregate and resell data indirectly.

A shift toward direct pricing of information could democratize this value, allowing smaller players - individuals, communities, and niche organizations - to monetize insights in ways not possible before.

Investors see parallels to the early days of fintech: when payments, once dominated by a few incumbents, were opened up by infrastructure startups like Stripe and Square. Tilt could do for knowledge markets what Stripe did for payments.

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Final Thoughts

With $7.1 million in Seed funding, Tilt is taking its first big step toward creating a new financial layer for the web - one where information is no longer exploited through ads but priced and valued directly.

The road ahead will require solving complex trust, market, and adoption challenges. But the opportunity? Enormous. If Tilt succeeds, it won’t just change how we pay for information online - it could redefine how the internet itself is monetized.