Marketing platform Noise aims to connect brands with content creators at a much lower cost than hiring traditional influencers or running standard ad campaigns.
On Wednesday, Noise announced a $5.5 million seed led by Capital Midwest, M25, and Grishin Robotics, bringing its total raise to $7.2 million. Others in the round include Capitalize VC and operators from companies like DoorDash.
The startup is tapping into the ever-expanding influencer market, in which 57% of young people and just a little 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, and it now touts 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. Right now, many of its customers are mobile apps, those working with startup 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 to this 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 gave them the idea for Noise. The fresh capital will be used to expand product capabilities and to hire. Noise also just launched its Organic-to-Ads program, letting brands take the videos that Noise creators make and run them as paid ads on Meta and TikTok, in addition to the creators’ posts.
“The creators still post to platforms,” he said. “But in addition, the brands can now put paid ads spend behind those creatives to reach more people.”
He pushed back when asked if this was a way to pay creators less than they could make on their own if a brand approached them. He said that brands will name their rates and creators can decide whether to say yes or no. He also emphasized that the platform specializes in working with “everyday people and turning them into brand-new creators.”
It’s harder to become an influencer these days, so this, Kafie believes, could be a way for many people to get around the stress, time, and money it takes to make it big in content creation on their own.
He said when a user first joins the platform, they take Noise creator training modules that teach them how to create content for brands. Those early creators can access only certain campaigns, but as they do more training and get hired for more work, higher-paid opportunities can come to them, Kafie said.
“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.”