Cami Tellez is back.
Tellez is the founder of the viral underwear brand Parade, which at one point was considered the Gen Z rival to Victoria’s Secret. Launched in 2019 when Tellez was just 21, the company went on to raise millions in funding and attract thousands of customers, but was sold in 2023 to lingerie maker Ariela & Associates. Late last year, Parade announced it was officially closing its doors.
But it turns out that Parade was just the beginning of Tellez’s journey as a founder. On Monday, she and former TikTok executive Jon Kroopf announced the launch of influencer marketing platform Devotion, which they said will help big brands run and manage their influencer programs.
Right now, many of these brands have teams of people juggling existing influencers and discovering new ones. It’s a tedious task, often bogged down by how fast this space moves.
“The first version of the creator economy was based on macro creators, brands that work with 15 or 20 highly visible faces every month,” Tellez said. “That model didn’t work.” Citing IAB 2025 report showing that the creators still account for around 2% of ad spend, added, “The issue isn’t trusting creators, it’s unlocking the high-scale model that works on a content-based algorithm.”
Devotion automates parts of this process, using artificial intelligence to help brands scale their creator discovery, management and content workflows. They still have humans to review AI decisions.
“There are no rogue agents operating independently of a human review,” Kroopf told TechCrunch. “But they do what we do much faster.”
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Devotion works with brands on tasks such as analyzing influencers’ posts and captions to ensure they comply with company guidelines. It helps brands decide which posts to share and boost. and can provide a brand fit score that indicates how well a creator aligns with the brand ethos. It also helps brands pay creators, which would be difficult to manage if the onus rested solely on humans, Kroopf said.
“It’s all about high-scale creator ecosystems,” said Tellez, the company’s chief creative officer. “A new type of creator community that scales up, lower CPMs [cost per millage], [and] more algorithmic impact.”
Tellez said Devotion spent much of the past year in beta and has already amassed more than 10 customers and reached seven figures in revenue. In addition to emerging from stealth, the company also announced that it raised $4 million in a round led by Basecase and Will Ventures.
“We’re using technology to open up what we think is a new opportunity where there hasn’t been much attention from the space so far because it just hasn’t been possible,” Kroopf said, adding that previously, it wasn’t cost-effective for a brand to devote so much money and resources to building a platform like this for itself.
“In 2019, when I started Parade, there was no real kind of software that allowed you to really engage ambassadors [influencers] At scale,” Tellez said. Back then, she and her team built technology that helped them track and execute gifting, engagement and payment, and create an integrated pipeline for managing their relationships with creators.
At the same time, he said he realized the algorithm had changed, really in an effort led by TikTok. Although Devotion was her idea, she brought in Kroopf to help her figure out how to deal with this new algorithm. Five years ago, for example, he said, a creator could make a post and reach about 20 percent of their audience. Today, that number is closer to 2%.
“Streaming is no longer defined by your social graph or number of followers,” he said. “It’s much more defined in the rendering of the content and the algorithm, and it’s driven by your interests and other, similar content that you’ve interacted with.”
The result is a brave new world: A nurse in Ohio has the same algorithmic capabilities as a macro-creator, Tellez said. “We’re entering a new paradigm where influence has been democratized.”
As a result, brands must act like content networks and engage with hundreds, no, thousands of influencers per month if they want to create content that can scale, Tellez said.
Devotion works on behalf of brands to create a customized content engagement strategy to better understand which influencers to tap into and how to nurture that community over time.
There are other creator economy agencies similar to this, such as Pearpop. Tellez said Devotion’s new capital will be used to hire more engineers and brand operators to further develop the company’s technology stack.
There are plans to build more AI agents soon, though nothing can be announced yet, they said. Overall, Tellez said she believes brands are still looking for authentic ways to connect with real people, working with people from across the spectrum (not just the most famous) to convey brand messages.
“We’re already seeing the consensus shift toward our vision of scalable creator ecosystems even for the world’s largest and traditionally most unpredictable brands,” said Tellez. “They don’t want to be trapped behind the algorithm. At the same time, we’re deepening our AI systems so we can manage thousands of creators with precision — without sacrificing taste or intimacy.”
