Parade Founder Cami Tellez Launches Devotion, a $4M Bet That AI Can Fix Creator Marketing at Scale

Cami Tellez built Parade into a viral intimates brand that raised millions, attracted a Gen Z following, and positioned itself as the anti-Victoria's Secret. Then the brand was sold to manufacturer Ariela & Associates in 2023. Late last year, Parade officially shut down.

Now Tellez is back with Devotion, a creator economy marketing platform she co-founded with Jon Kroopf, a former TikTok executive. The company emerged from stealth with $4 million in funding led by Basecase and Will Ventures, and it's already generating seven figures in annual revenue after a year in beta with more than 10 clients.

The pitch: Devotion uses AI to help large consumer brands manage creator programs at a scale that human teams simply can't handle. Not 15 influencers a month. Hundreds. Potentially thousands. The platform automates discovery, vetting, brand fit scoring, content compliance review, performance analysis, and payment, while keeping humans in the loop for editorial judgment and brand safety decisions.

This isn't a celebrity endorsement play. It's an infrastructure play for the long tail of creators.

Tellez's thesis starts with a structural critique of how brands have approached creator partnerships. "The first version of the creator economy was built around macro creators, brands working with 15 or 20 highly visible faces each month. That model hasn't worked." She's not wrong. A 2025 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that creators still account for roughly 2% of total ad spend, despite years of industry enthusiasm. The gap between belief in creator marketing and actual budget allocation suggests something is broken in how brands execute these programs.

The culprit, according to Tellez, is operational. Brands believe in creators. They just can't manage them at the scale needed to compete with paid media's efficiency. When a brand works with 15 influencers, a small team can handle contracts, briefs, reviews, and payments. When that number grows to 500 or 5,000, the logistics collapse.

There's also an algorithmic problem. Five years ago, Tellez estimates, a creator's post would reach about 20% of their audience. Today, thanks to TikTok's algorithmic model and its influence on every other platform, that number is closer to 2%. The feed is no longer determined by social graphs or follower counts. It's determined by content performance. "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." This shift fundamentally changes the economics of creator marketing. If a macro influencer's post only reaches 2% of followers, you need volume. Lots of creators, producing lots of content, with the algorithm deciding what gets distribution. A nurse in Ohio with strong content performance can outperform a celebrity with 10 million followers. The question is whether brands have the infrastructure to find and manage those creators.

The platform operates across three core workflows.

Devotion's AI scans the creator landscape and surfaces candidates based on a brand's specific criteria, not just follower counts or engagement rates, but content style, audience demographics, posting consistency, and what the company calls a "brand fit score." This score predicts how well a creator's voice and aesthetic align with the brand, reducing the guesswork that typically accompanies influencer selection.

Once creators are activated, the platform reviews posts and captions against brand and regulatory guidelines before they go live. It identifies which content pieces are likely to perform well and recommends amplification strategies. The system learns from performance data over time, creating a feedback loop that continuously improves creator selection and content optimization.

Paying hundreds of creators with different rates, deliverables, and timelines is a logistical nightmare that has plagued the industry. Devotion handles payment processing as part of the platform, removing what Kroopf called one of the biggest barriers to scaling creator programs. The company deliberately keeps humans in the decision loop. Editorial judgment, cultural fluency, and brand safety reviews sit alongside the AI. It's a recognition that pure automation can miss context, nuance, and the kind of evolving community norms that get brands into trouble.

Kroopf's background deserves scrutiny because it explains a dimension of Devotion that press coverage has largely overlooked. At TikTok, he operated at the intersection of algorithms, creator ecosystems, and brand partnerships. He watched firsthand as TikTok's recommendation engine upended the follower-based model that Instagram and YouTube built their creator economies around. That experience informs Devotion's algorithmic approach to creator matching.

Most influencer platforms still weight follower counts heavily in their discovery algorithms. Devotion deprioritizes follower metrics in favor of content performance signals and brand alignment scores. In an era where a creator with 3,000 followers can generate more engagement than one with 300,000, the distinction is more than academic. It's structural.

The combination of Tellez's operator instincts and Kroopf's platform knowledge is unusual in creator tech. Most companies in this space are founded by either marketers or engineers. Devotion's founding team is a brand builder and a platform insider, which may explain why the product's design philosophy prioritizes operational utility over feature spectacle.

Four million dollars is a modest raise. In a market where competitors have raised $100M or more, Devotion's funding gives it a narrow runway to prove its model before it needs to either grow revenue dramatically or raise again. Tellez's name carries cachet in consumer and D2C circles, but Parade's trajectory, from cultural phenomenon to shutdown, also raises questions about sustainability.

Seven figures in revenue and 10 clients is promising for a year-old beta, but the creator marketing platform space is littered with companies that found early traction and then struggled to scale. The challenge isn't signing the first 10 brands. It's signing the next 100 while keeping the platform's AI accurate enough to justify the premium over manual processes.

There's also a deeper question about whether AI can truly replace the human judgment that makes creator marketing effective. Algorithms can surface candidates and flag compliance issues. Whether they can capture the cultural intuition that separates a successful creator campaign from a forgettable one remains unproven at scale.

And the timing is worth noting. Creator marketing is hot. Every venture fund wants exposure. That enthusiasm can paper over fundamental questions about unit economics, switching costs, and defensibility that matter more when the market cools.

What Tellez brings that most founder-led martech companies lack is lived experience as a customer of the product she's building. Parade's growth was fueled by an early, homegrown ambassador system. Tellez built the playbook that Devotion now seeks to industrialize. That's not a marketing claim. It's operational knowledge that came from managing thousands of creator relationships with tools that barely existed.

Kroopf's TikTok background adds a layer of platform expertise that matters in the algorithmic era. Understanding how content distribution works on the platforms where creators operate is table stakes for building technology that optimizes for it.

The next 12 months will be revealing. Can Devotion grow beyond its initial client base? Will the AI-driven brand fit scores hold up as programs scale to thousands of creators? And most critically, will enterprise marketing budgets actually shift from macro influencer partnerships to the long-tail model Devotion enables?

Creator marketing is at an inflection point. The industry knows the old model of paying celebrities for posts is fading. What replaces it, whether it's AI-managed creator networks or something else entirely, is still being decided. Devotion is placing its bet. For marketers spending seven or eight figures on creator programs, the answer matters more than the hype.