Noise Raises $5.5M to Scale Per-View Pay for Everyday Creators
Noise announced on September 16, 2026 a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25 and Girshin Robotics. The financing brings the company's total funding to $7.2 million, with participation from CapitalizeVC and operators from companies including DoorDash TechCrunch. Noise said it will use the fresh capital to expand product capabilities and to hire.
The company was launched in 2025 by Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt and Nic Weber after building mobile game app Playbite. Its stated premise is that everyday people can earn as social media creators, without first building a large audience.
Access is deliberately open. Anyone can download the Noise app regardless of follower count to join brand campaigns. Noise reports 1.5 million creators on its platform, who create content for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube TechCrunch. For brands, the pitch is distribution at scale. Noise lets brands run campaigns simultaneously across thousands of content creators.
Payment is tied to delivery, not reach on paper. Noise pays creators per view rather than a flat fee, and takes a fee from what brands pay creators once views are delivered. CEO Diego Kafie said the company's top creators make more than six figures a year. That structure is extended by an Organic-to-Ads program, which lets brands run creator-made videos as paid ads on Meta and TikTok in addition to creators' posts.
The broader context here is familiar to anyone who has built two-sided marketplaces. Follower counts are a proxy for influence. Views are closer to the actual inventory brands buy. Shifting compensation from negotiated flat fees to metered payouts lowers the cost of experimentation for advertisers and lowers the entry barrier for supply. It also moves operational complexity elsewhere, into view attribution, deduplication across platforms, and fraud controls.
In my view, the interesting test is whether long-tail creator supply can stay reliable under that model. Thousands of small posts can aggregate into meaningful reach. They can also vary widely in quality, brand suitability, and retention. A per-view system aligns incentives around output that gets watched. It does not by itself solve review, rights management for paid whitelisting, or fatigue when similar briefs go to very large creator cohorts at once. Those are product and operations problems, not funding problems.
Worth flagging alongside that is what changes if the model holds. Flat-fee sponsorship favors established accounts with leverage in negotiation. Metered, open enrollment favors volume, iteration speed, and native format fluency. For tech-literate marketing teams, that looks less like traditional influencer buying and more like programmatic user-generated content supply, with creative testing distributed across people instead of centralized in a studio.
Noise is still early, and hiring and product expansion will determine how much of that workflow it can absorb. The seed round gives it room to build. If everyday posters can reliably earn from views, and brands can reliably buy that attention with less overhead, both sides get a simpler transaction than the current bespoke market.
