Parade’s Founder Returns With an AI Marketing Agency That’s Quietly Making Seven Figures |
Parade’s Founder Returns With an AI Marketing Agency That’s Quietly Making Seven Figures
Cami Téllez is betting on automation, data, and AI agents to change influencer marketing for fast-growing brands.
BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @ANNIEBURBA
Cami Tellez. Photo: Getty Images
Cami Téllez’s second act is here—just four months after the permanent closure of her first.
The 28-year-old entrepreneur founded Parade, a buzzy direct-to-consumer underwear brand beloved by Gen Z, in 2019 and sold the company to Miami Beach-based Ariela & Associates International for an undisclosed amount about four years later. Then, last October, Parade abruptly announced it was shutting down for good.
Now, Téllez is turning over a new leaf by launching her new venture, an AI-powered influencer marketing agency called Devotion. The New York City-based firm, which she co-founded with former TikTok Shop executive Jon Kroopf in March 2025, has been operating in stealth mode for the past nine months.
Devotion has already raised $4 million in seed funding from investors including Basecase and Will Ventures and helped “dozens” of brands scale their influencer marketing programs, according to Téllez, who serves as its chair and creative chief while Kroopf acts as CEO. The agency is currently making seven figures in annual recurring revenue, she adds.
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Téllez says that when she started Parade, she had a thesis that “the next generation of consumer brands were really going to have to build communities, ambassadors, in order to cut through the noise.” But because “there was no real technology that allowed you to do that” in 2019, her team needed to build an in-house influencer marketing tool.
Devotion aims to both provide other brands with the technology she lacked back then and accelerate the growth of their influencer marketing programs using AI.
“We do everything from recruit creators, to gift them, to message them at scale and activate them, to incentivize them to post content, to reconcile the content, to pay them out,” Téllez says. “We deploy AI agents across all of that.”