Cami Tellez is again.
Tellez is the founding father of the viral undergarments model Parade, which at one level was seen because the Gen Z rival to Victoria’s Secret. Launched in 2019, when Tellez was simply 21, the corporate went on to boost tens of millions in funding and appeal to hundreds of shoppers, however was bought in 2023 to the lingerie producer Ariela & Associates. Late final yr, Parade introduced it was formally closing its doorways.
Nevertheless it seems Parade was just the start of Tellez’s journey as a founder. On Monday, she and former TikTok government Jon Kroopf introduced the launch of the influencer advertising platform Devotion, which they mentioned will assist massive manufacturers to run and handle their affect applications.
Proper now, many of those manufacturers have human groups juggling current influencers and discovering new ones. It’s a tedious job usually slowed down by how briskly this house strikes.
“The primary model of the creator financial system was constructed round macro creators, manufacturers working with 15 or 20 extremely seen faces every month,” Tellez mentioned. “That mannequin hasn’t labored.” Citing a 2025 IAB report exhibiting that creators still account for about 2% of ad spend, she added, “The difficulty isn’t perception in creators, it’s unlocking the high-scale mannequin that works in a content-based algorithm.”
Devotion automates elements of this course of, utilizing AI to assist manufacturers scale their creator discovery, administration, and content material workflows. They nonetheless have people to assessment the AI’s selections.
“There are not any rogue-like brokers that function independently of a human assessment,” Kroopf informed TechCrunch. “However they make the whole lot we do a lot sooner.”
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Devotion works with manufacturers on duties resembling analyzing influencers’ posts and captions to make sure they’re inside firm tips; it helps manufacturers resolve which posts to share and increase; and it may possibly present a model match rating indicating how properly a creator aligns with the model’s ethos. It additionally helps manufacturers pay creators, which might be troublesome to handle if the accountability lay solely with people, Kroopf mentioned.
“It’s all about high-scale creator ecosystems,” Tellez, the corporate’s inventive director, mentioned. “A brand new sort of creator group that drives extra scale, decrease CPMs [cost per millage], [and] extra algorithmic influence.”
Tellez mentioned Devotion spent a lot of final yr in beta mode and has already amassed greater than 10 purchasers and reached seven figures in income. Other than rising from stealth, the corporate additionally introduced it raised $4 million in a spherical led by Basecase and Will Ventures.
“We’re leveraging expertise to open up what we expect is a brand new alternative, the place there hasn’t been a whole lot of consideration paid from the house to date, as a result of it simply wasn’t possible,” Kroopf mentioned, including that beforehand, it wasn’t cost-effective for a model to dedicate a lot cash and assets to constructing a platform like this for themselves.
“In 2019, once I began Parade, there was no actual sort of software program that allowed you to actually have interaction ambassadors [influencers] at scale,” Tellez mentioned. Again then, she and her workforce constructed expertise that helped them observe and execute gifting, engagement, fee, and construct an end-to-end pipeline to handle their relationships with creators. “That was a dramatic drive of our progress,” she continued, noting that many different founders got here to her throughout that point asking how they, too, might replicate influencer engagement.
On the similar time, she mentioned she realized that the algorithm had modified, actually in an effort led by TikTok. Although Devotion was her concept, she introduced on Kroopf to assist her perceive the best way to have interaction with this new algorithm. 5 years in the past, for instance, she mentioned, a creator might make a submit, and it will attain about 20% of their viewers; right this moment, that quantity is nearer to 2%.
“The feed is not decided based mostly in your social graph or your follower depend,” she mentioned. “It’s far more decided on the efficiency of the content material and the algorithm and pushed by you rinterests and different content material, related content material you might have interacted with.”
The result’s a courageous new world: A nurse in Ohio has the identical algorimitic potential as a macro-creator, Tellez mentioned. “We’re getting into into a brand new paradigm the place affect has been democratized.”
Because of this, manufacturers have to function like content material networks and work with lots of, no, hundreds of influencers a month in the event that they wish to create content material that may drive scale, Tellez mentioned.
Devotion works on behalf of manufacturers to construct a bespoke content material engagement technique to raised perceive which influencers to faucet and the best way to foster that group over time.
There are different creator financial system businesses just like this, like Pearpop. Tellez mentioned Devotion’s recent capital shall be used to rent extra engineers and model operators to construct out extra of the corporate’s tech stack.
There are plans to construct extra AI brokers quickly, although nothing could be introduced but, they mentioned. General, Tellez mentioned she thinks manufacturers are nonetheless searching for genuine methods to attach with actual folks, working with folks from throughout the spectrum (not simply essentially the most well-known) to get model messaging throughout.
“We’re already seeing the consensus shift in the direction of our imaginative and prescient for scaled creator ecosystems for even the world’s largest and historically most risk-averse manufacturers,” Tellez mentioned. “They don’t wish to get caught behind the algorithm. On the similar time, we’re deepening our AI programs so we are able to handle hundreds of creators with precision — with out sacrificing style or intimacy.”
