Kami Telles is back.
Telles is the founder of the buzzy underwear brand Parade, which was once considered a Gen Z rival to Victoria's Secret. Founded in 2019 when Telles was just 21 years old, the company went on to raise millions of dollars and attract thousands of customers before being sold to lingerie maker Ariela and Associates in 2023. Late last year, Parade announced it was officially closing its doors.
But it turns out Parade was just the beginning of Tellez's journey as a founder. On Monday, she and former TikTok executive Jon Krupf announced the launch of influencer marketing platform Devotion, which they say will help major brands run and manage influence programs.
Many of these brands now have teams of humans who discover existing and new influencers. This is a tedious task that often gets bogged down by the speed of movement in this space.
“The first version of the creator economy was built around macro creators, brands working with 15 or 20 very high-profile faces every month,” Telles said. “That model didn't work,” he said, citing a 2025 IAB report showing creators still account for about 2% of ad spending, adding, “The problem is not trust in creators, but unlocking a model at scale that works with content-based algorithms.”
Devotion uses AI to automate some of this process, helping brands scale creator discovery, management, and content workflows. There are still humans reviewing AI decisions.
“There is no roguelike agent that operates independently of human review,” Kroopf told TechCrunch. “But they make everything we do much faster.”
tech crunch event
San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026
Devotion works with brands on tasks like analyzing influencer posts and captions to ensure they fall within company guidelines. It helps brands decide which posts to share and promote. It can also provide a brand fit score that shows how well the creator aligns with your brand's ethos. It also helps brands pay creators, Krupf said, but that would be difficult to manage if the responsibility rested solely with humans.
“The key is a large ecosystem of creators,” said Tellez, the company's creative director. “A new type of creator community with bigger scale and lower CPMs. [cost per millage], [and] A more algorithmic influence is likely. ”
Tellez said Devotion has spent much of the last year in beta mode and has already gained more than 10 clients and reached seven figures in revenue. Apart 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 new opportunities, and this is an area that hasn't really gotten a lot of attention because it just wasn't possible,” Krupf said, adding that previously it wasn't cost-effective for brands to spend so much money and resources to build such a platform in-house.
“When I started Parade in 2019, there was no software that could actually interact with ambassadors. [influencers] “At that time, she and her team built technology that helped them build an end-to-end pipeline to track and execute gifts, engagements, payments, and manage relationships with creators. “That was a dramatic driver of our growth,” she continued, noting that at the time, many other founders came to her and asked how they, too, could replicate engagement with influencers.
At the same time, she said, she realized that the algorithm had actually been changed by a TikTok-led effort. Devotion was her idea, but to understand how to work with this new algorithm, she introduced Kroopf. For example, five years ago, she said, if a creator created a post, that post would reach about 20% of their audience. Today, that number is closer to 2%.
“Your feed is no longer determined based on your social graph or number of followers,” she said. “It really depends on the content and algorithm performance, and it depends on the user's interests and other content and similar content that the user has interacted with.”
The result is a brave new world. Nurses in Ohio have the same algorithmic potential as macro creators, Telles said. “We are entering a new paradigm where influence is democratized.”
As a result, Telles says if brands want to create content that can scale, they need to operate like a content network and work with hundreds or even thousands of influencers a month.
At Devotion, we work on behalf of brands to build bespoke content engagement strategies to help them better understand which influencers to leverage and how to cultivate that community over the long term.
There are other creator economy agencies like this, such as Pearpop. Tellez said Devotion's new funding will be used to hire more engineers and brand operators to further build out the company's technology stack.
Although they can't announce anything yet, they say they have plans to build more AI agents in the near future. Overall, Telles said brands are still finding authentic ways to connect with real people and are working with a variety of people (not just the most famous) to get their brand messages across.
“We're already seeing consensus shift toward a vision of a large creator ecosystem, even among the world's largest and traditionally most risk-averse brands,” Telles said. “They don't want to be trapped by algorithms. At the same time, they're powering their AI systems to precisely manage thousands of creators without sacrificing flair or intimacy.”