GoKawiilMarketing platform Noise aims to connect brands with content creators at a much lower cost than hiring traditional influencers or running standard ad campaigns.
That’s because many creators on the Noise platform are everyday people — anyone can download the app, regardless of follower count — and Noise presents them with campaigns they can join and create content for on their platforms of choice (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube). It then pays them per view rather than a flat fee. Brands, meanwhile, sign up for Noise to share their content brief requests and budget. From there, Noise makes it easy to handle the rest, so brands can scale without the operational headaches of sourcing content creators, managing client relationships one by one, or managing payments. Noise lets them run campaigns simultaneously across thousands of content creators.
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 CapitalizeVC 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 is 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.”
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