Noise, a marketing platform, aims to connect brands with content creators at a much lower cost than hiring traditional influencers or running standard ad campaigns. The platform enables everyday people—regardless of follower count—to download the app and participate in campaigns, creating content for platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Creators are paid per view rather than a flat fee. Brands sign up to share content briefs and budgets, and Noise handles the operational complexities, allowing them to run campaigns across thousands of creators simultaneously without the headaches of sourcing talent, managing relationships, or processing payments.
On Wednesday, Noise announced a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25, and Girshin Robotics, bringing its total funding to $7.2 million. Other participants include CapitalizeVC and operators from companies like DoorDash.
The startup is tapping into the ever-expanding influencer market, where 57% of young people and just over 40% of U.S. adults overall now want to take part. It joins 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. Noise now boasts 1.5 million creators on the platform. CEO Kafie said the company’s top creators make more than six figures a year, and the platform takes a fee from what brands pay creators once views are delivered.
“Our top brands work with several thousand creators on autopilot,” he said. Currently, many of its customers are mobile apps and startups with budgets that want to employ influencer marketers. The goal is to one day work with companies of all sizes.
“They are the most interested in reaching a really wide range of potential customers, making them the prime users for something like Noise, where they can easily recruit a small army of people to become their biggest users and advocates,” Kafie said. “This gives brands unprecedented level of content diversity and reach at a fraction of the cost of other traditional marketing playbooks.”
Kafie, Feldt, and Weber came up with the idea from their experiences at Playbite. “We tried a bunch of different creative marketing strategies,” Kafie said of how they tried to scale Playbite. For example, they attempted to recruit their own gamers and teach them how to create social content that promoted the app. “We started with five, ten, 25, then 100 people,” he continued. “Before we knew it, our installs were skyrocketing as this small army of people went to places like TikTok and posted engaging content daily about mobile games and our app specifically.”
Most importantly, he noted, this happened “at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing playbooks,” because they were teaching regular people how to be content creators from scratch. “Had we gone to established creators with big followings and clout, their rates would’ve been cost-prohibitive for our scrappy startup budget.”
That experience led them to build Noise, which now aims to democratize content creation and provide affordable marketing solutions for brands of all sizes.
via TechCrunch