Marketing platform Noise is building a way for brands to connect with content creators at a significantly lower cost than hiring traditional influencers or relying on conventional advertising campaigns.
The platform is designed around the idea that creators do not necessarily need large followings to produce valuable content. Many of the people using Noise are everyday users, and anyone can download the app regardless of how many followers they have. Noise then presents these users with brand campaigns they can participate in, allowing them to create content on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Instead of receiving a fixed fee, creators are paid based on the number of views their content generates.
For brands, the process begins by signing up for Noise and providing campaign briefs along with their budgets. Noise then handles the operational side of the campaigns, allowing companies to scale their creator efforts without having to individually source creators, manage relationships one at a time or handle payments themselves. The platform enables brands to run campaigns across thousands of creators simultaneously.
On Wednesday, Noise announced a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25 and Grishin Robotics, taking the company’s total funding raised to $7.2 million. CapitalizeVC and operators from companies including DoorDash also participated in the round.
The startup is entering an influencer market that continues to expand, with 57% of young people and slightly more than 40% of U.S. adults overall now expressing an interest in becoming influencers. Noise is joining a growing group of companies building infrastructure for content creators, including Billo and JoinBrands.
Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt and Nic Weber founded Noise in 2025 after spending two years developing a mobile gaming app called Playbite. The company now says it has 1.5 million creators on its platform.
CEO Kafie said Noise’s highest-earning creators make more than six figures annually. The company generates revenue by taking a fee from the amount brands pay creators after their content generates views.
“Our top brands work with several thousand creators on autopilot,” Kafie said. Many of Noise’s customers today are mobile app companies, particularly startups operating with smaller marketing budgets that want to use influencer marketing. The company eventually hopes to serve businesses of every size.
According to Kafie, mobile apps are especially interested in reaching a broad range of potential customers, making them a natural fit for Noise. He said these companies can use the platform to quickly recruit large numbers of people who can become active users and advocates for their products.
“This gives brands unprecedented level of content diversity and reach at a fraction of the cost of other traditional marketing playbooks,” Kafie said.
The founders developed the idea for Noise based on what they experienced while building Playbite. Kafie said the team experimented with several creative marketing approaches as it tried to scale the mobile gaming company.
One strategy involved recruiting gamers and teaching them how to create social media content promoting the app. “We started with five, ten, 25, then 100 people,” Kafie said. Before long, he added, Playbite’s installs began increasing rapidly as this growing group posted engaging content about mobile games and Playbite itself on platforms such as TikTok.
The most important part, according to Kafie, was that this growth happened “at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing playbooks.” The company was essentially teaching ordinary people to become content creators from the ground up.
“If we had gone to established creators with big followings and clout, their rates would’ve been cost-prohibitive for our scrappy startup budget,” he said.
That experience ultimately led to the creation of Noise. The newly raised funding will be used to expand the company’s product capabilities and grow its team.
Noise has also recently introduced its Organic-to-Ads program. The feature allows brands to take videos created by Noise users and use them as paid advertisements on Meta and TikTok, in addition to having the content appear organically through the creators’ own accounts.
“The creators still post to platforms,” Kafie said. “But in addition, the brands can now put paid ads spend behind those creatives to reach more people.”
When asked whether this model could result in creators being paid less than they might receive by working directly with a brand, Kafie rejected that idea. He said brands determine the rates they are willing to offer, while creators remain free to accept or decline campaigns.
He also stressed that Noise’s focus is specifically on working with “everyday people and turning them into brand new creators.”
As becoming an influencer becomes increasingly difficult, Kafie believes Noise could provide an alternative for people who want to earn money from content creation without having to independently deal with the time, financial investment and pressure involved in building a large following.
When users first join Noise, they complete creator training modules designed to teach them how to produce content for brands. Initially, those creators can access only certain campaigns. As they complete more training and gain experience through additional assignments, Kafie said, they can become eligible for higher-paying opportunities.
“By democratizing ‘becoming a creator’ to literally anyone with a smartphone,” he said, “we’re bringing costs down for brands, but enabling millions of people to make their first dollar on the internet.”
