Parade founder Cami Tellez launches creator-economy marketing platform with $4M funding

Cami Tellez is making a return.

Tellez is best known as the founder of the viral underwear brand Parade, which at one point was widely viewed as a Gen Z challenger to Victoria's Secret. She launched the company in 2019, when she was only 21. Parade went on to raise millions in funding and build a large customer base, but in 2023, it was sold to lingerie manufacturer Ariela & Associates. Then, late last year, Parade announced that it would officially shut down. It now appears that Parade was only the first chapter in Tellez's entrepreneurial path. On Monday, she and former TikTok executive Jon Kroopf unveiled a new influencer marketing platform called Devotion, designed to help major brands operate and manage their influencer programs more effectively.

At the moment, many of those brands still rely on human teams to juggle relationships with current influencers while also searching for new ones. It is a labour-intensive process, made even more difficult by the speed at which the creator economy continues to evolve.

"The first version of the creator economy was built around macro creators, brands working with 15 or 20 highly visible faces each month," Tellez said. "That model hasn't worked." Referring to a 2025 IAB report showing that creators still account for only about 2% of advertising spend, she added, "The issue isn't belief in creators, it's unlocking the high-scale model that works in a content-based algorithm."

Devotion is built to automate parts of that work, using AI to help brands scale creator discovery, management, and content workflows. The company said humans are still involved in reviewing the AI's decisions.

"There are no rogue-like agents that operate independently of a human review," Kroopf said. "But they make everything we do much faster."

Devotion works with brands on a range of tasks, including analysing influencer posts and captions to confirm they comply with company guidelines. It also helps brands determine which posts to share or amplify and can generate a brand-fit score that shows how closely a creator aligns with a company's identity and values. The platform also helps manage payments to creators, something Kroopf said would be difficult to handle efficiently if done only by human teams.

"It's all about high-scale creator ecosystems," said Tellez, who serves as 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 spent much of last year in beta and has already signed more than 10 clients, reaching seven figures in revenue. Alongside emerging from stealth, the startup also announced that it has raised $4 million in a funding round led by Basecase and Will Ventures.

"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," Kroopf said, adding that in the past, it was not cost-effective for a brand to invest so much money and effort into building a platform like this on its own.

"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. At that time, she and her team built internal technology to track and manage gifting, engagement, and payments, and to create an end-to-end pipeline for managing relationships with creators. "That was a dramatic drive of our growth," she continued, adding that many founders approached her during that period, asking how they could also replicate that kind of influencer engagement.

At the same time, Tellez said she understood that the algorithm itself had changed, largely due to shifts driven by TikTok. Although Devotion started as her idea, she brought in Kroopf to help her better understand how brands should operate within this new algorithmic reality. Five years ago, she said, a creator might post something that reached about 20% of their audience. Today, that figure is closer to 2%.

"The feed is no longer determined based on your social graph or your follower count," she said. "It's much more determined by the performance of the content and the algorithm, and driven by your interests and other content, similar content you have interacted with."

That shift has created, in Tellez's view, an entirely new landscape. A nurse in Ohio, she said, now has the same algorithmic potential as a major creator. "We're entering into a new paradigm where influence has been democratised."

As a result, Tellez said brands now need to behave more like content networks, working with hundreds or even thousands of influencers each month to produce content capable of driving scale.

Devotion works on behalf of brands to build a customised content-engagement strategy, helping them better identify which influencers to work with and how to nurture those creator communities over time.

Other agencies in the creator economy operate in a similar space, including Pearpop. Tellez said Devotion plans to use its new funding to hire more engineers and brand operators as it continues building out its technology stack.

The company also plans to introduce more AI agents in the near future, although Tellez and Kroopf said they are not ready to share specific details yet. More broadly, Tellez said she believes brands are still searching for authentic ways to connect with real people, working with creators from across the spectrum — not just the biggest names — to spread their messaging.

"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," Tellez said. "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."