Noise Raises $5.5 Million to Pay Everyday Creators by the View
Noise announced on September 16, 2026 a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25 and Girshin Robotics. The financing brings total funding to $7.2 million, with participation from CapitalizeVC and operators from companies including DoorDash TechCrunch. The company said it will use the money to expand product capabilities and hire.
The company was launched in 2025 by Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt and Nic Weber after building the 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 open. Anyone can download the Noise app, regardless of follower count, to join brand campaigns. Noise reports 1.5 million creators on its platform making content for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube TechCrunch. For brands, the pitch is distribution at scale, with campaigns running at the same time across thousands of creators.
Payment is tied to delivery, not promised reach. 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 top creators make more than six figures a year. An Organic-to-Ads program extends that setup, letting brands run creator-made videos as paid ads on Meta and TikTok in addition to creators' posts.
The broader context here is familiar from two-sided marketplaces, platforms that connect buyers on one side and sellers on the other. Follower counts are a rough stand-in for influence. Views are closer to the inventory brands actually buy. Moving from negotiated flat fees to counted payouts lowers the cost of testing for advertisers and lowers the entry barrier for creators. It moves work elsewhere, into counting views, avoiding duplicates across platforms, and fraud controls.
In my view, the test is whether long-tail supply, the large group of smaller creators, can stay dependable. Thousands of small posts can add up to large reach. They can also vary in quality, brand fit, and how long viewers keep watching. A per-view system rewards output that gets watched. It does not by itself solve review, rights management for paid reuse, or fatigue when very large groups get similar briefs at once. Those are product and operations problems, not funding problems.
Worth flagging alongside that is what changes if the model holds. Flat-fee deals favor established accounts with leverage in negotiation. Open enrollment paid by the meter favors volume, fast iteration, and fluency in native formats. For marketing teams, that looks less like traditional influencer buying and more like on-demand supply of user-made video, with testing spread across people instead of one studio. Noise is still early, and hiring and product work will shape how much of that workflow it can handle. The seed round gives it room to build. If everyday posters can reliably earn from views, and brands can buy that attention with less overhead, both sides get a simpler deal than the current custom market.
