Noise Labs raises $7.1M from Paradigm to build prediction markets for cultural relevance

Uh 60 might be time to speed it up, Quo. Let's step it up. Let's step on the gas. Let's get you into a ZR1X hopefully. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Gabe from Noise. He's the CEO and we got some fantastic news. Thank you for waiting.

How are you doing? Welcome.

Good to see you, dude.

Good to see you.

Absolute pleasure, gentlemen.

It's great to be here.

First time on the show. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and noise.

And get the gong ready.

I will I will warm up the gong.

Yeah. So, my name is Gabe. I'm one of the co-founders of Noise. Um, we started this project maybe at the start of 2025 when we started building it. But the idea is to build this trading platform for relevance, right? So, can we give users the ability to long or short trends, brands, ideas, and have these markets kind of be rooted to uh social data in a way? So, you know, when you combine the trading activity and you combine the kinds of things you're seeing on Twitter or Tik Tok or Reddit, you kind of end up with this uh objective measure of cultural relevance for different types of brands or trends. And uh for many reasons, we think that's extremely important for where the world is at today. But maybe we can jump into those uh that you guys.

Yeah. So maybe Yeah. May maybe an example. So like uh we when we started covering Leubu, we were like this must mean it's about to be over and I think it was like I think just a lot [laughter] of the stock at least has sold off a lot in that situation. There's a public company associated with the product. So that that

you can track Google trends but uh yeah walk me through more of how you pull out signal from all the noise around a brand there's so many different data points that you can use to track so like Google trends is a good example

Google trends uh in an era where people are spending more time in apps more time in and all these things like social relevancy how much something's being talked about

uh is uh there's less signal there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the process like?

Yeah. So Google trends is you know if you were to look at a market on noise let's say it's cloud code or it was labu you would see something structurally similar to Google trends

the problem with that is you know like 20% of the information that is going into Google trends is what actually matters in today's world right what was saying uh you're seeing things on Tik Tok on Instagram on on Twitter um so the Lubu one's interesting we basically uh we partnered with Kaido first so they were doing this already for the crypto industry specifically So they were building social graphs on Twitter and they were able to tell you you know how much relevance does poly market have versus call sheet in that industry. How much relevance does um you know AI compared to DeFi have and then you can see kind of how that relevance changes over time. What we care most about is kind of the market component of it which is you know it's great like you can get a snapshot of where attention is today. You know can you really trust it? That's that's something to discuss as well. Um, but we want to use markets that have kind of this forward-looking nature. Um, and how basically all these different types of industries make decisions based off of trends and resource allocation, right? Um, so where are trends going to go in the future? Where is relevance going to shift? We're talking about movie theaters. If you're talking about, you know, is claude is anthropic still going to be as important as it is today in the AI industry in 20 by the end of 2026. These are all like extremely interesting questions, right? Um, so yeah,

if you're pulling uh if you're if you're using signal from social and uh and these markets get to some amount of scale, there will become an incentive for uh market participants to try to game it, right? I can think of somebody spinning up a bot farm and and talking about Leubu millions and millions of times in a inorganic way. How have you guys thought about like parsing through all the noise and trying to find like real signal?

Yeah, for sure. Um, it's a good question and it's often like one of the number one questions we get, but we pull from a variety of sources and I'd also add that um the relevance on noise is very much market based. So it satisfies the criteria of any other market which is you know if the relevance of let's say claude or movie theaters or peptides is going to go up it's because people are inherently putting capital behind those positions right they're longing it um and those are good questions but I think you the best question that we could try to answer right now is is social media data alone today a good measure of relevance a good measure of understanding the shared interest of the world our bet is that you know Markets are probably the best coordination mechanism for these kinds of questions and we just need markets to be a little better about reading where genuine interests are and where those trends are uh than social media data alone. So is it a solved problem? No. We'll continue to basically build in that direction, but uh it's definitely interesting.

What uh what are some rising trends that you guys are thinking about building markets around for this year specifically?

Yeah. Uh, I really indie rock music. I think people aren't really noticing this, but it's it's been on the rise for the last 18 months.

My prediction is this is coinciding with uh this return to in-person meta. Indie rock music is probably the best kind of music for that.

Um, so that's one. We see Claude Code. I think one of the interesting things is with noise is you kind of get to see where echo chambers are breaking, right? because claude code was kind of this thing in Silicon Valley that took over the entire timeline and everybody assumed you know nobody's using chatb at this point that these open AI products are basically in the dust but um the things that we were seeing is the engagement and and the kinds of interest that people have in chatb is still higher than claw uh no matter what so um when you actually compare these things side by side at a very global level it's interesting to see uh where these trends are actually at

Yeah.

Yeah. How do you think about relevancy to particular sub communities or niches? Because we were reading this piece in Vulture about uh David Allison and we were joking that they they were saying that Oracle is this sleepy no-name company that makes a lot of money but it's not known or it's not popular. And in us it was like in the headlines all last year. We were following it very closely. We know everything about the about the company. Uh, and so but but at the same time I understand where the vulture writer is is talking about in the sense that like Oracle is not a company that

they're like Oracle the sailboat company.

Yeah. Yeah. Like if you stop someone on the street they might not be talking about Oracle where they might know about Leubu. So how do you think about someone's stock rising relative just to their niche?

Yeah. Um, one of the most interesting things that we found when we launched our beta

Mhm.

in summer of last year was that people were kind of, you know, we kept seeing uh maybe 40% of the users that we had invited onto the platform using it every single day, every single day. Consistent time patterns and we were like, you know, why the hell are you using this so much? Right? So, we're trying to talk to these people and part of it was they were they wanted these niche trends to be part of their daily news cycle, right? They wanted to see how the relevance was changing based off things that they really cared about. And mind you, we're talking about some projects in in the crypto industry that people don't really know your audience probably doesn't even know exist.

Um, and it was about kind of engaging with other people who are also interested in those things or have differing opinions about those things. Um, and basically creating communities around these niche trends. So, uh, yes, it's interesting.

Yeah,

more interests are becoming niche over time. Um, but still the echo chambers and seeing where you're actually at is is something crazy.

We love we we love an echo.

We love echo chambers. We celebrate echo chambers.

Give me the lead. Who led the round? How much did you raise?

Paradigm 7.1 million. [music]

Great hit. With authority. With authority.

Congratulations.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great. Great to finally have you on the show, Gabe. Uh excited to cheers.

Excited to track noise on noise in the near future.

We will talk to you soon.

Have a great rest of your day. Bye.

Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning,