Bratty cool Gen Z lingerie label Parade may have shut its doors last year, but its founder Cami Tellez is already onto her next act, this time with a sharper technological edge. After selling Parade in 2023 to Ariela & Associates, Tellez has teamed up with former TikTok executive Jon Kroopf to launch Devotion, an AI powered influencer marketing platform designed to help large brands operate at algorithm scale.
The startup formally emerged this week with 4 million dollars in funding led by Basecase and Will Ventures, positioning itself not as a traditional agency but as a technology infrastructure layer for the creator economy.
At the core of Devotion is automation built around artificial intelligence. Instead of relying on human teams to manually scout, vet, manage, and pay influencers, the platform uses AI systems to analyze creators’ posts, captions, tone, and engagement data. It assigns brand fit scores, flags guideline risks, recommends which posts to amplify, and streamlines creator payments.
Human oversight remains in place, but the heavy lifting is handled by software designed to process thousands of micro decisions at once. The founders argue that this hybrid model allows brands to scale creator programs without losing control or brand safety.
The technological thesis behind Devotion reflects a deeper shift in how social media platforms, especially TikTok, now distribute content. Tellez notes that in the past, reach was largely tied to follower counts, with creators reliably accessing a significant share of their audience.
Today, algorithmic feeds prioritize performance signals over social graphs, meaning a relatively unknown user can generate as much visibility as a celebrity if the content resonates. Devotion’s software is built to decode these performance patterns, helping brands operate more like data driven content networks rather than relying on a handful of high profile ambassadors.
The company says it spent much of last year refining its AI systems in beta, securing more than 10 clients and reaching seven figure revenue before publicly launching. Fresh capital will be used to expand its engineering team and develop additional AI agents aimed at managing thousands of creators simultaneously with precision. For Tellez, who once had to build internal software at Parade just to coordinate influencer gifting and payments at scale, Devotion represents a full circle moment, turning hard earned operational lessons into a standalone technology platform built for an algorithm first advertising era.