Prominent crypto venture capital firm Paradigm has led a $7.1 million seed investment round for Noise, a New York-based startup building a novel "attention market" platform. The funding builds upon a previously unannounced pre-seed round from Figment Capital and Anagram, with strategic investments from GSR, JPEG Trading, and KaitoAI.
Noise CEO and co-founder Gabriel Perez Carafa described the platform as a complement and alternative to traditional prediction markets. Instead of betting on binary event outcomes, Noise allows users to place wagers on which topics—such as brands, trends, and narratives—will retain cultural relevance over time. The platform essentially creates a "stock market for trends," combining elements of Google Trends with prediction market mechanics to filter signal from noise.
The platform launched in a private beta testnet in May 2025, attracting over 1,300 users who placed wagers across 14 markets tracking crypto topics using social media data from Kaito. Carafa noted the team was surprised by the viral interest, testing the platform for about five months before scaling up. During this phase, an interesting correlation was observed between attention market interest in Pump.fun and the price of the PUMP perpetual contract on Hyperliquid, though Carafa clarified that attention seemed to both lead and follow price without being a reliable predictor.
The fresh capital will fund continued development and expansion, including growing data needs as the team looks beyond the crypto information sphere. Noise is preparing for its mainstream public launch "in the coming months" on Base, the Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Coinbase. This launch will open the platform to the public and "real capital," serving as a crucial test of its fundamental economic theory and social utility.
The funding round attracted several prominent angel investors, including new media figures Jordi Hays (TBPN) and Jackson Dahl (Dialectic), musician Justin "3LAU" Blau, Kaito's Yu Hu, and crypto investors Gaby Goldberg and Kain Warwick. David Phelps, co-founder of the onchain sentiment platform Jokerace, is also a backer, expressing excitement about platforms that incentivize attention toward meaningful topics.
Carafa, who co-founded Noise with two other University of Southern California graduates, entered the crypto space with a "'competition is for losers' mentality," aiming to create a new category. He remarked that if Noise doesn't have direct competitors within six months of being fully live, "something seriously wrong has happened."
