Noise Raises $5.5M Seed to Pay Everyday Creators Per View

Noise, a marketplace that pays everyday users per view rather than flat influencer fees, raised a $5.5 million seed round on Wednesday, bringing its total funding to $7.2 million. Capital Midwest, M25, and Grishin Robotics led the round, with Capitalize VC and operators from DoorDash also participating.

The model is straightforward. Anyone can download the Noise app regardless of follower count. The platform presents them with brand campaigns, they create content on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, and Noise pays them per view. Brands post content briefs and budgets, and Noise handles sourcing, relationship management, and payments — allowing campaigns to run simultaneously across thousands of creators.

Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt, and Nic Weber launched Noise in 2025 after two years building the mobile game app Playbite. The platform now claims 1.5 million creators. Kafie says top creators earn more than six figures a year, and Noise takes a fee from what brands pay once views are delivered.

The economics driving adoption

Noise targets a specific budget tier: mobile apps and startups that want influencer-style reach without influencer-style rates. The pitch worked on the founders first. While scaling Playbite, they recruited their own gamers and trained them to post promotional content on TikTok.

"We started with five, ten, 25, then 100 people," Kafie said. "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."

That growth came cheap because they trained regular people 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," Kafie said.

"Our top brands work with several thousand creators on autopilot," he added. "This gives brands unprecedented level of content diversity and reach at a fraction of the cost of other traditional marketing playbooks."

The company positions itself inside a growing market: 57% of young people and just over 40% of U.S. adults say they want to participate in the creator economy. Noise competes with content creator infrastructure players like Billo and JoinBrands.

Organic-to-Ads expands the surface

Alongside the funding, Noise launched its Organic-to-Ads program. Brands can now take videos made by Noise creators and run them as paid ads on Meta and TikTok, in addition to the creators' organic posts.

"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."

For practitioners, that turns each campaign into dual inventory: organic reach from thousands of micro-creators plus a whitelisting-style paid channel built from the same assets — without negotiating usage rights creator by creator.

Separating claims from confirmation

The company's confirmed numbers are the $7.2 million total raise, 1.5 million creators, and six-figure top-earner claims from the CEO. The per-view rates themselves are not disclosed, so brands cannot independently benchmark costs against standard influencer pricing from the outside.

Kafie rejects the suggestion that the model underpays creators who could command more working directly with brands. Brands set their rates, he said, and creators choose whether to accept. He also addressed the supply side: new users complete Noise's training modules on creating brand content, start with limited campaign access, and unlock higher-paid opportunities as they complete more training and work.

"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."

The fresh capital will fund product expansion and hiring as Noise pushes beyond startup budgets toward companies of all sizes.