Noise raises $5.5M to turn everyday people into paid content creators

Noise is a marketing platform that connects brands with content creators at a lower cost than hiring traditional influencers or running standard ad campaigns. Its creators are largely everyday people — anyone can download the app regardless of follower count — who join campaigns and post content on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, and get paid per view rather than a flat fee. Brands sign up to share content briefs and budgets, and Noise handles sourcing creators, managing relationships, and processing payments across thousands of creators at once.

On Wednesday, Noise announced a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25, and Grishin Robotics, bringing its total raise to $7.2 million. Capitalize VC and operators from companies including DoorDash also participated. The startup is targeting the influencer market, in which 57% of young people and just a little over 40% of U.S. adults overall now want to take part, joining other content-creator infrastructure companies like Billo and JoinBrands.

Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt, and Nic Weber launched Noise in 2025 after spending two years building a mobile game app called Playbite, and the platform now says it has 1.5 million creators. CEO Kafie said the company’s top creators make more than six figures a year, and Noise takes a fee from what brands pay creators once views are delivered. “Our top brands work with several thousand creators on autopilot,” he said.

The idea grew out of Playbite, where the founders recruited their own gamers to post social content promoting the app, scaling from five people to 100 as installs grew — “at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing playbooks,” Kafie said, because they were teaching regular people to become creators from scratch rather than paying established influencers with large followings.

The fresh capital will fund product development and hiring. Noise also just launched its Organic-to-Ads program, letting brands turn videos made by Noise creators into paid ads on Meta and TikTok, in addition to the creators’ own posts.

Why it matters

Noise is betting that AI-era brands would rather pay thousands of ordinary people small, performance-based fees than pay a smaller number of established influencers flat rates — a shift that could reshape how influencer marketing budgets are spent.