Cami Tellez, the entrepreneurial force behind the once-viral Gen Z undergarments brand Parade, has made a decisive return to the tech and brand landscape, announcing the launch of Devotion, an AI-powered influencer marketing platform. This new venture, co-founded with former TikTok executive Jon Kroopf, aims to revolutionize how large brands manage and scale their creator programs in an increasingly complex and algorithm-driven digital ecosystem. The company, emerging from stealth mode, has already secured $4 million in a funding round led by Basecase and Will Ventures, alongside demonstrating significant early traction with over 10 clients and achieving seven-figure revenue during its beta phase.
The announcement marks a significant pivot for Tellez, whose previous endeavor, Parade, captured the attention of millions and was widely heralded as a formidable Gen Z challenger to established lingerie giants like Victoria’s Secret. Launched in 2019 when Tellez was just 21, Parade quickly garnered substantial funding and built a loyal customer base through its inclusive messaging, vibrant designs, and innovative digital marketing strategies. However, after a period of rapid growth, the company faced considerable operational challenges, leading to its acquisition by lingerie manufacturer Ariela & Associates in 2023 and its subsequent closure announcement late last year. This journey, from meteoric rise to eventual shuttering, provided Tellez with invaluable firsthand experience in leveraging creator relationships for brand growth, an insight that now forms the bedrock of Devotion.
The Genesis of Devotion: Learning from Parade’s Journey
Parade’s ascent was intrinsically linked to its adept use of influencer marketing and community building. Tellez understood early on the power of authentic voices and grassroots engagement, a stark contrast to the traditional, celebrity-endorsement heavy campaigns favored by older brands. At Parade, Tellez and her team developed proprietary internal technology to manage their extensive network of brand ambassadors, handling everything from gifting and content tracking to engagement and payment processing. This end-to-end pipeline was, as Tellez noted, a "dramatic driver of our growth." The experience highlighted a critical gap in the market: the lack of scalable software solutions for brands looking to build and manage vast creator ecosystems. Many other founders, observing Parade’s success, approached Tellez seeking to replicate her approach to influencer engagement, further solidifying her conviction that a broader solution was needed.
The challenges faced by Parade, particularly in scaling operations and maintaining profitability amidst intense competition and evolving consumer demands, also informed the strategic direction of Devotion. Tellez recognized that while the vision for a democratized, creator-led marketing approach was powerful, the tools to execute it efficiently at scale for large enterprises were still rudimentary. The market needed a sophisticated platform that could handle the complexity of hundreds, if not thousands, of creator relationships, moving beyond the manual, human-intensive processes that often bottlenecked brand efforts.
Addressing a Shifting Creator Economy Landscape
Devotion is entering an influencer marketing landscape that has undergone a profound transformation, largely driven by algorithmic shifts on platforms like TikTok. Tellez highlights that the "first version of the creator economy was built around macro creators, brands working with 15 or 20 highly visible faces each month." This model, she argues, "hasn’t worked" effectively in the long run. Despite the buzz around creators, a 2025 IAB report indicates that creators still account for only about 2% of total ad spend, suggesting a significant untapped potential that current models fail to unlock.
The core issue, Tellez explains, isn’t a lack of belief in creators but rather the absence of a "high-scale model that works in a content-based algorithm." She points to a fundamental change in how social media feeds operate: "The feed is no longer determined based on your social graph or your follower count. It’s much more determined on the performance of the content and the algorithm and driven by your interests and other content, similar content you have interacted with." Five years ago, a creator’s post might reach 20% of their audience; today, that figure is closer to 2%. This paradigm shift means that influence has been "democratized," where, as Tellez vividly puts it, "a nurse in Ohio has the same algorithmic potential as a macro-creator."
This democratization necessitates a new approach for brands. To generate meaningful scale and algorithmic impact, brands must now operate akin to content networks, engaging with hundreds, even thousands, of influencers monthly. The traditional model of relying on a handful of celebrity endorsers or top-tier influencers is increasingly inefficient and expensive, struggling to keep pace with the sheer volume and velocity of content required to stay relevant in dynamic algorithmic environments.
Devotion’s AI-Driven Solution for Scaled Engagement
Devotion steps into this evolving landscape with a sophisticated, AI-powered platform designed to empower large brands to navigate the complexities of the modern creator economy. The platform automates critical parts of the influencer marketing process, from discovery and management to content workflows, allowing brands to scale their programs exponentially.
The functionality of Devotion is comprehensive:
- Creator Discovery: Utilizing AI, the platform helps brands identify a diverse range of creators, including micro and nano-influencers, who align perfectly with their brand ethos and campaign objectives. This moves beyond simplistic follower counts to assess true brand fit and audience resonance.
- Content Management and Compliance: Devotion analyzes influencer posts and captions to ensure they adhere to company guidelines and brand messaging. This is crucial for maintaining brand safety and consistency across a vast network of creators.
- Performance Optimization: The platform assists brands in deciding which creator-generated content to share, boost, or amplify, based on predictive analytics and performance metrics. It can provide a "brand fit score," indicating how well a creator’s content and audience align with the brand’s values and target demographic.
- Streamlined Payments: One of the most significant pain points in managing large-scale creator programs is payment processing. Devotion automates this, simplifying what would otherwise be an overwhelming administrative burden for human teams. Jon Kroopf emphasizes that this automation makes managing thousands of creators feasible.
While AI is central to Devotion’s operations, a crucial element of its design is the "human-in-the-loop" approach. Kroopf assured TechCrunch, "There are no rogue-like agents that operate independently of a human review. But they make everything we do much faster." This ensures that while efficiency is paramount, human judgment and strategic oversight remain integral, preserving brand integrity and creative nuance.
Tellez, serving as the company’s creative director, succinctly articulates Devotion’s core mission: "It’s all about high-scale creator ecosystems. A new type of creator community that drives more scale, lower CPMs [cost per thousand impressions], [and] more algorithmic impact." By building bespoke content engagement strategies, Devotion helps brands understand not only which influencers to tap but also how to cultivate and foster those communities over time, ensuring sustained relevance and authentic connection.
Market Opportunity, Funding, and Future Outlook
The market for influencer marketing continues its explosive growth, projected to reach over $24 billion globally in 2024. However, a significant portion of this market remains underserved by scalable, technologically advanced solutions, particularly for large enterprises that struggle with the sheer volume and dynamic nature of creator engagement. Kroopf points out this untapped opportunity: "We’re leveraging technology to open up what we think is a new opportunity, where there hasn’t been a lot of attention paid from the space thus far, because it just wasn’t feasible." Previously, the cost and resources required for a brand to develop such a comprehensive platform in-house were prohibitive.
The successful $4 million funding round, led by Basecase and Will Ventures, underscores investor confidence in Devotion’s vision and its seasoned leadership team. Tellez’s proven entrepreneurial track record, combined with Kroopf’s deep expertise from TikTok, positions Devotion strongly to capitalize on this burgeoning market. The company’s achievement of seven-figure revenue and acquisition of over 10 clients during its beta phase further validate its product-market fit and the urgent need for its solution among brands.
Looking ahead, Devotion plans to utilize its fresh capital to expand its engineering team and hire more brand operators, further enhancing its tech stack and service offerings. The company anticipates building more AI agents in the near future, although specific details remain under wraps. Tellez firmly believes that brands are continually seeking authentic ways to connect with real people, and that effective messaging requires engaging a broad spectrum of creators, not just the most famous ones.
Broader Implications for Influencer Marketing and Brand Strategy
Devotion’s emergence signals a significant inflection point for the influencer marketing industry. It represents a maturation of the space, moving beyond manual processes and anecdotal successes to a more data-driven, scalable, and technologically sophisticated approach. The platform’s emphasis on AI and automation for "scaled creator ecosystems" addresses a critical challenge for brands: how to efficiently engage a diverse, distributed network of creators to achieve mass algorithmic reach and authentic brand advocacy.
The shift towards leveraging micro and nano-influencers, facilitated by platforms like Devotion, has profound implications. It democratizes access for creators, providing opportunities for individuals with genuine passion and niche audiences to partner with major brands. For brands, it offers a pathway to more authentic, diverse, and cost-effective marketing campaigns, moving away from the often-inflated costs and diminishing returns of macro-influencer strategies. Lower CPMs, greater algorithmic impact, and more genuine connections with target audiences become achievable at a scale previously unimaginable.
While other creator economy agencies like Pearpop exist, Devotion’s specific focus on empowering large brands with an AI-driven, end-to-end platform for managing vast, performance-optimized creator networks positions it uniquely. It caters to the evolving needs of major brands that require enterprise-grade solutions to navigate the complexities of modern content distribution and consumer engagement.
In conclusion, Cami Tellez’s latest venture with Devotion is not merely a new chapter for an experienced founder; it represents a strategic response to fundamental shifts in the digital marketing landscape. By harnessing AI to enable "scaled creator ecosystems," Devotion aims to empower brands to stay ahead of the ever-changing algorithms, foster authentic connections with diverse communities, and unlock the full, democratized potential of the creator economy. As Tellez affirms, "We are already seeing the consensus shift towards our vision for scaled creator ecosystems for even the world’s largest and traditionally most risk-averse brands. They don’t want to get caught 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." This vision for a more intelligent, expansive, and authentic brand-creator relationship is poised to redefine influencer marketing for years to come.
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