Marketing platform Noise bridges the gap between brands and content creators at a significantly lower cost than traditional influencer partnerships or standard advertising campaigns.
The platform caters to everyday individuals—anyone can download the app regardless of their follower count—and connects them with campaigns they can join on their preferred platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Creators are compensated per view rather than through a flat fee. Meanwhile, brands register on Noise to submit content briefs and budgets. The platform then manages the logistics, allowing brands to scale seamlessly without the operational burdens of sourcing creators, managing individual client relationships, or processing payments. This enables brands to simultaneously run campaigns across thousands of creators.
On Wednesday, Noise secured a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Capital Midwest, M25, and Grishin Robotics, bringing its total funding to $7.2 million. Additional participants in the round include Capitalize VC and operators from companies such as DoorDash.
The startup capitalizes on the rapidly expanding influencer market, where 57% of young people and slightly over 40% of U.S. adults express a desire to participate. It joins the ranks of other content creator infrastructure platforms like Billo and JoinBrands.
Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt, and Nic Weber founded Noise in 2025 after spending two years developing the mobile game app Playbite. The platform currently boasts 1.5 million creators.
CEO Kafie noted that the platform’s top creators earn over six figures annually, and Noise collects a fee from the brands once views are successfully delivered.
“Our top brands collaborate with several thousand creators autonomously,” Kafie stated. Currently, many of its clients are mobile applications operating on startup budgets that seek to utilize influencer marketers. The ultimate goal is to eventually partner with companies of all sizes.
“They are highly interested in reaching a diverse audience, 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 provides brands with an unprecedented level of content diversity and reach at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing strategies.”
Kafie, Feldt, and Weber derived this concept from their experiences with Playbite. “We experimented with various creative marketing strategies,” Kafie explained regarding how they scaled Playbite. For instance, they attempted to recruit their own gamers and teach them to create social content promoting the app. “We started with five, then ten, then twenty-five, and finally one hundred people,” he continued. “Before we knew it, our app installs skyrocketed as this small army of people went to platforms like TikTok and posted engaging content daily about mobile games and our app.”
Most importantly, he noted, this occurred “at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing playbooks” because they were teaching regular people to become content creators from scratch. “Had we targeted established creators with large followings and clout, their rates would have been prohibitively expensive for our startup budget,” he added.
This experience inspired the creation of Noise. The newly acquired capital will be allocated toward expanding product capabilities and hiring. Noise has also just launched its Organic-to-Ads program, which allows brands to take the videos created by Noise creators and run them as paid advertisements on Meta and TikTok, supplementing the creators’ organic posts.
“The creators continue to post to platforms,” he said. “In addition, brands can now invest paid ad spend behind those creatives to reach a wider audience.”
When asked if the platform was a way to pay creators less than they could earn independently if approached by a brand, Kafie pushed back. He explained that brands set their own rates, and creators can choose whether to accept or decline. He also emphasized that the platform specializes in working with “everyday people and turning them into brand-new creators.”
Given that it is increasingly difficult to become an influencer, Kafie believes this could offer many people a way to bypass the stress, time, and financial investment required to build a successful content creation career independently.
He explained that when a user first joins the platform, they complete Noise creator training modules that teach them how to produce content for brands. Early creators can only access specific campaigns, but as they complete more training and secure more work, higher-paying opportunities become available to them.
“By democratizing ‘becoming a creator’ to literally anyone with a smartphone,” he said, “we’re reducing costs for brands while enabling millions of people to earn their first dollar on the internet.”
