Cami Tellez of Parade announces a new financial advertising platform, $4M in funding

Cami Tellez is back.

Tellez is the creator of the viral undergarments brand Parade, which once looked like Gen Z is competing with Victoria’s Secret. Founded in 2019, when Tellez was only 21 years old, the company went on to raise millions of dollars and attract thousands of customers, but was sold in 2023 to underwear manufacturer Ariela & Associates. Late last year, Parade announced it was closing its doors.

But it seems that Parade was just the beginning of Tellez’s journey as an entrepreneur. On Monday, he and former TikTok CEO Jon Kroopf announced the launch of the Devotion advertising platform, which they said will help large companies run and manage their apps.

Currently, most of these products have teams of people who are running existing products and discovering new ones. It is a tedious task, which is often confused by the state of the space.

“The first creator economy was built around macro creators, brands that work with 15 or 20 beautiful faces every month,” Tellez said. “That model didn’t work.” Citing the 2025 IAB report showing that the creators accounts for about 2% of advertising revenue, he added, “The problem is not to believe that there are developers, it is to open a high-quality model that works in a fixed algorithm.”

Devotion uses some aspects of this process, using AI to help marketers improve content creation, management, and content flow. They still have people to review AI decisions.

“There are no agents like fraudsters who operate without public oversight,” Kroopf told TechCrunch. “But he makes everything we do go faster.”

Devotion works with the brand on tasks such as analyzing promoters’ posts and captions to ensure they are within company guidelines; helps creators decide what to share and add; and it can provide an indication of how well the manufacturer fits into the brand’s culture. It also helps brands pay their creators, which can be difficult to manage if the responsibility rests with the people themselves, Kroopf said.

“It’s all about the high-end environment,” said Tellez, the company’s director. “A new type of production team that drives higher volumes, lower CPMs (cost per millage), (and) increased engagement.”

Tellez said Devotion spent most of last year in beta mode and has already acquired more than 10 customers and reached seven figures in funding. Apart from the fraudulent exit, the company also announced that it raised $4 million in a round led by Basecase and Will Ventures.

“We are using technology to open up what we think is a new opportunity, where there hasn’t been much interest from the space until now, because it hasn’t been possible,” said Kroopf, adding that in the past, it was not cheap for a brand to spend a lot of money with tools to build a platform like this.

“In 2019, when I started Parade, there was no real program that allowed you to engage with ambassadors (promoters) at the level,” said Tellez. Back then, he and his team developed technology that helped them track and deliver gifts, engagement, and payments, and create end-to-end pipelines to improve their relationship with manufacturers. “That was the most interesting part of our growth,” he continued, noting that many other founders came to him at the time and asked how they too could make an impact.

At the same time, he said he noticed that the algorithm had changed, led by TikTok. Although Devotion was his idea, he brought in Kroopf to help him understand how to implement this new approach. Five years ago, for example, he said that, a producer can make a post, and it will reach about 20% of their audience; today, that number is closer to 2%.

“This feed is no longer known based on your graph or the number of followers you have,” he said. “It’s very much determined by how the content is algorithmic and your preferences and so on, what you’ve experienced.”

The result is a brave new world: Nurses in Ohio have the same potential as a great developer, Tellez said. “We are entering a new paradigm in which democratic power.”

As a result, brands need to work as content networks and work with hundreds, if not thousands, of startups if they want to create content that can drive success, Tellez said.

Devotion works on behalf of brands to create a bespoke communication strategy to better understand their influencers and how to motivate that group over time.

There are other wealth creation organizations similar to this one, such as Pearpop. Tellez said Devotion’s new funding will be used to hire more engineers and brand users to create more of the company’s technology.

There are plans to build more AI assistants in the near future, though nothing has yet been announced, he said. Overall, Tellez said he thinks that brands are still looking for real ways to connect with real people, working with different people (not the most famous) to send messages of any kind.

“We’re already seeing a shift in our vision for the world’s largest and most sustainable ecosystem,” said Tellez. “They don’t want to be caught by an algorithm.” At the same time, we are expanding our AI system to manage thousands of creatives in detail – without losing taste or friendliness.”