Parade’s Cami Tellez announces new creator economy marketing platform, $4M in funding

Cami Tellez is back.

Tellez is the founder of the viral undergarments brand Parade, which was once seen as a 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 underwear manufacturer Ariela & Associates. Late last year, Parade announced that it would be officially closing its doors.

But it turns out that the Parade was just the beginning of Tellez’s journey as an inventor. On Monday, he and former TikTok CEO Jon Kroopf announced the launch of influencer marketing platform Devotion, which they say will help big brands run and manage their influencer programs.

Right now, most of these brands have teams of people who mix with existing influencers and find new ones. It is a tedious task that is often bewildered by how fast this space is moving.

“The first version of the creator economy was built around great creators, brands that work with 15 or 20 visual faces each month,” Tellez said. “That model doesn’t work.” Citing the IAB’s 2025 report showing that they do not create it still accounts for about 2% of ad spending, adding, “The problem is not trusting creators, it’s opening a high-level model that works with an algorithm based on content.”

Devotion automates parts of this process, using AI to help brands streamline creative discovery, management, and content workflow. They still have people to review the AI’s decisions.

“There are no rogue agents that operate without human review,” Kroopf told TechCrunch. “But they make everything we do so much faster.”

Dedicated to working with brands on tasks such as analyzing influencer posts and captions to ensure they are within company guidelines; helps brands decide which posts to share and promote; and can provide a brand equity score that shows how well the creator fits the brand’s values. It also helps companies pay creators, which can be difficult to manage if the burden rests solely on people, Kroopf said.

“It’s all about the nature of the top creators,” said Tellez, the company’s creative director. “A new type of creator community that drives more scale, lower CPMs [cost per millage], [and] more algorithmic impact. ”

Tellez said Devotion has spent much of the past year in beta mode and has already amassed more than 10 clients and reached seven figures in revenue. Besides coming out of hiding, the company also announced that it has raised $4 million in a round led by Basecase and Will Ventures.

“We are using technology to open up what we think is a new opportunity, where there has not been much attention from the space until now, because it was not possible,” said Kroopf, adding that in the past, it was not cheap for the product to contribute a lot of money and resources to build a platform like this.

“In 2019, when I started Parade, there was no real software that allowed you to really engage with ambassadors. [influencers] at scale,” said Tellez. During that time, he and his team built technology that helped them track and make gifts, engagements, payments, and build a leading pipeline to manage their relationships with creators. “That was an incredible boost to our growth,” he continued, noting that many other founders came to him at the time asking how they, too, could replicate founder engagement.

At the same time, he said he noticed that the algorithm had changed, in an effort led by TikTok. Although the surrender was his idea, he brought in Kroopf to help him understand how to engage with this new process. Five years ago, for example, he said, a creator can make a post, and it will reach about 20% of their audience; today, that number is closer to 2%.

“A server is no longer determined by your social graph or your number of followers,” he said. “It’s largely determined by the performance of the content and the algorithm and is driven by your interests and other content, similar content that you’ve interacted with.”

The result is a brave new world: The Ohio nurse has the same algorithmic power as a great inventor, Tellez said. “We are entering a new paradigm where influence has been democratized.”

As a result, brands need to act like content networks and work with hundreds, if not thousands, of influencers per month if they want to create content that can drive scale, says Tellez.

Devotion works for brands to develop a content engagement strategy to better understand which influencers to buy and how to nurture that community over time.

There are other creator economy centers like this, like Pearpop. Tellez said Devotion’s new capital will be used to hire more engineers and product staff to build the company’s technology stack.

There are plans to build more AI agents soon, though nothing has been announced yet, they said. Overall, Tellez said he thinks brands are still looking for authentic ways to connect with real people, working with people from across the spectrum (not just the most popular) to convey brand messages.

“We’re already seeing a shift in consensus in our vision to create a high-quality creator environment for even the world’s largest brands and is traditionally risk-averse,” said Tellez. “They don’t want to be caught behind an algorithm. At the same time, we’re deepening our AI systems so we can handle thousands of creators with precision – without sacrificing flavor or intimacy.”