Parade’s Camille Tellez announces new marketing platform for the Creator Economy with $4M in funding

Cami Tellez is back.

Tellez is the founder of the ubiquitous lingerie brand Parade, which at one time was viewed as a cult sensation Generation Z is a competitor to Victoria’s Secret. Launched in 2019, when Tellez was just 21 years old, the company went on to raise millions in funding and attract thousands of customers, but was sold in 2023 to lingerie manufacturer 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 CEO John Kropf announced the launch of influencer marketing platform Devotion, which they said will help big brands run and manage their influencer programs.

Currently, many of these brands have human teams that work to match existing influencers and discover new ones. It’s a daunting task, often bogged down by how fast this space moves.

“The first version of the Creator Economy was built around macro creators, brands that work with 15 or 20 notable faces each month,” Tellez said. “This model didn’t work.” Citing IAB 2025 report Turns out the creators It still represents about 2% of ad spending, She added: “The problem is not to believe in creators, but to open a large-scale model that works in a content-based algorithm.”

Dedication automates parts of this process, using AI to help brands scale creator discovery, management, and content workflows. They still have humans to review AI decisions.

“There are no rogue agents operating independently of human review,” Kropf told TechCrunch. “But they make everything we do much faster.”

Devotion works with brands on tasks like analyzing influencer posts and captions to ensure they are within company guidelines; It helps brands decide which posts to share and boost; It can provide a brand fit score that indicates how closely the content creator aligns with the brand ethos. It also helps brands pay creators, which would be difficult to manage if the responsibility fell solely to humans, Kropf said.

“It’s all about the broad ecosystems of creators,” said Tellez, the company’s creative director. “A new kind of creator community that delivers greater scale, lower CPM (cost per thousand), (and) greater algorithmic impact.”

Devotion spent most of last year in beta mode and has already amassed more than 10 customers and reached seven figures in revenue, Tellez said. Aside from coming out of stealth, the company also announced that it has raised $4 million in a 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 interest from the space yet, because it just wasn’t possible,” Kropf said, adding that previously, it wasn’t cost-effective for a brand to devote a lot of money and resources to building a platform like this for themselves.

“In 2019, when I started Parade, there wasn’t any real type of program that would allow you to engage ambassadors (influencers) at scale,” Tellez said. In that time, she and her team built technology that helped them track and implement gifts, engagement, and payments, and build an end-to-end pipeline for managing their relationships with creators. “That was a huge driver of our growth,” she continued, noting that several other founders came to her during that period and asked how they too could replicate influencer engagement.

Meanwhile, she said she realized the algorithm had changed, thanks to efforts led by TikTok. Although “fidelity” was her idea, she enlisted Kropf to help her understand how to approach this new algorithm. Five years ago, for example, a creator could create a post and reach about 20% of their audience, she said; Today, that number is closer to 2%.

“The feed is no longer determined by your social graph or the number of followers you have,” she said. “It depends more on the performance of the content and the algorithm, and it depends on your interests and other, similar content you’ve interacted with.”

The result is a brave new world: The nurse in Ohio has the same algorithmic capabilities as the overall creator, 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, even thousands, of influencers a month if they want to create content that can drive volume, Tellez said.

Devotion works on behalf of brands to build a personalized content engagement strategy to better understand which influencers to leverage and how to nurture that community over time.

There are other creator economy agencies similar to this, such as Pearlpop. Tellez said Devotion’s new capital will be used to hire more engineers and brand operators to build out more of the company’s technology stack.

They said there are plans to build more AI agents soon, though nothing has been announced yet. Overall, Tellez said she believes brands are still looking for real ways to connect with real people, working with people from across the spectrum (not just the most famous) to communicate brand messages.

“We are already seeing a shift in consensus towards our vision of large-scale creative ecosystems for even the world’s largest and most traditionally risk-averse brands,” Tellez said. “They don’t want to get bogged down by algorithms. At the same time, we’re deepening our AI systems so we can micromanage thousands of creators — without sacrificing taste or intimacy.”