Cami Tellez built Parade into a Gen Z darling by doing influencer marketing differently. Hundreds of micro-creators, not a handful of celebrities. Volume and iteration, not expensive bets on a few famous faces. The brand became known as much for its creator strategy as its underwear.

Parade sold in 2023. And now Tellez is building the infrastructure she had to improvise.

Devotion launched publicly on March 2, 2026, with a $4M seed round led by Basecase and Will Ventures. Co-founded with Jon Kroopf, a former TikTok executive, the platform targets brands running large-scale creator programs—the kind where you’re managing hundreds or thousands of relationships simultaneously and need software to keep it from collapsing under its own weight.

The question worth asking: is this a real product category, or a well-funded solution looking for a problem?

Quick Verdict

Aspect	Rating
Concept & Positioning	★★★★★
AI Feature Depth	★★★★☆
Pricing Transparency	★★☆☆☆
Who It’s Actually For	★★★☆☆

Best for: Brand marketing teams running 100+ creator relationships monthly Skip if: You’re a creator, a small brand, or anyone managing under 50 partnerships Price: Not publicly disclosed—enterprise sales model

Devotion launch coverage (TechCrunch)

The Thesis Behind the Product

Tellez has been saying some version of the same thing in every interview: the first era of influencer marketing is over.

“The first version of the creator economy was built around macro creators, brands working with 15 or 20 highly visible faces each month,” she said at launch. “That model hasn’t worked.”

Her read on what changed is specific and worth taking seriously. Platform feeds are no longer organized around who you follow. They’re organized around content performance—what gets watched, saved, and shared. A creator with 50,000 highly engaged followers in a specific niche can outperform a creator with 5 million passive followers if the content hits right.

That changes the math for brands. If you can’t rely on follower count as a proxy for reach, you need to test more creators to find the ones whose content actually performs with your target audience. And if you’re testing 50 to 150 creators per campaign instead of 15, you need infrastructure to manage the volume.

That’s Devotion’s pitch. And unlike a lot of VC-backed “AI for influencers” stories, it comes from a founder who actually ran this problem at scale.

What the Platform Does

Devotion is brand-side infrastructure, not a creator marketplace. The distinction matters.

Most influencer platforms are databases: here are 10 million creators, find the ones you want. Devotion is designed for brands that have already figured out their creator strategy and need tooling to execute it at volume.

The core workflow looks like this:

Testing at scale. Instead of betting on a small roster, Devotion helps brands run 50 to 150 micro and nano creators simultaneously, with modular briefs that provide three hook variations, three product benefits, and three CTAs. Each creator gets a version tuned to their content style, not a generic copy-paste brief.

Performance analysis. The AI tracks engagement metrics the platform actually weights: 3-second hold rate, 25% view-through rate, save and share behavior. Not follower count, not raw views. The content signals that actually predict whether something is working on algorithm-driven feeds.

Creator-brand fit scoring. Before you send anyone a brief, the AI evaluates alignment between a creator’s content and your brand. Tone, product category fit, audience intent, overlap with your existing customer profile. The goal is to stop wasting time on creators who look right on paper but don’t convert.

Guideline compliance checks. When content comes in, the system flags missing disclosures, risky product claims, and brand safety issues. This is the unsexy infrastructure layer that every brand doing volume influencer marketing needs and almost none of them have built well.

Amplification routing. Once you identify top performers—typically within 48 hours of content going live—the platform suggests which posts to put paid spend behind through whitelisting. The human team makes the call, but the AI surfaces the candidates.

Kroopf’s TikTok background shows up clearly in the product design. This is very much a platform built around how content-first social feeds actually work, not around how legacy influencer marketing agencies have historically pitched campaigns.

The Brand-Side Problem Nobody Is Building For

Here’s the gap Devotion is positioning against, and it’s real.

The tools that exist for managing large creator networks are either agency spreadsheets dressed up as software, or enterprise platforms built for procurement-style thinking (filter by follower count, sign contract, pay invoice). Neither handles the actual operational complexity of running 200 creator relationships simultaneously at the content execution level.

What that looks like in practice: a marketing team is manually tracking which creator sent their draft, who needs revisions, who missed the disclosure, which pieces performed and by how much, which creators to renew, which to off-board. At 20 creators a month, a good coordinator can hold that in their head. At 200, it’s a full-time job just to not drop things.

Devotion’s claim is that the AI handles the tracking and flagging, so the human team focuses on the actual decisions: which briefs to write, which content to amplify, which creators to deepen relationships with.

None of the influencer tools that dominated 2024 and 2025—the Aspires and Creator.cos of the world—were built around this workflow. They were built around discovery and contracting, not around ongoing relationship and content operations at volume.

Who’s Actually Using It

Devotion says it has 10+ clients and has already crossed seven-figure revenue, all while in beta. Revenue before a public launch means these are real customer relationships with real contracts, not free pilots. That’s worth something.

The clients aren’t named publicly. But the customer profile Devotion is describing—brands running hundreds of creator partnerships monthly—points to DTC companies, CPG brands, and growth-stage startups in beauty, fashion, wellness, and fitness. Categories where creator content is both a major acquisition channel and a production challenge.

The “brands need to operate like content networks” framing Tellez keeps returning to is borrowed from media company thinking, not from traditional marketing strategy. A content network doesn’t do 20 episodes per season and hope one hits. It produces constantly, measures what works, doubles down, cancels what doesn’t. Devotion is pitching that brands should apply the same operating model to their creator programs.

That’s a real strategic shift, and it’s already happening at companies with the resources to build it internally. Devotion is the bet that the market for “sell this as software” is big enough.

What I’d Want to Know Before Signing

The product direction is credible. Tellez has actually done this. Kroopf ran creator programs at TikTok. And $4M from Basecase and Will Ventures is real money from investors who know this space.

But Devotion launched today, and there are things that aren’t clear yet.

Pricing. Nothing public. The enterprise sales model means custom quotes, which means you’re not finding out the number until you’re in a sales conversation. That’s a legitimate choice for this market, but if you’re a growth-stage brand with a real but not unlimited budget, you’d want to know where this sits before investing time in demos.

Integration depth. How does Devotion connect to your existing stack? Does it talk to Sprout Social, Asana, your internal tracking, your paid media dashboard? The operational value of a tool like this depends heavily on whether it reduces context-switching or adds another login.

Creator-side experience. The platform is brand-side, but creators are the other half of the relationship. What does it feel like to receive a brief through Devotion? How does payment work? If the creator experience is clunky, you’ll lose the good creators to direct relationships faster.

The compliance layer in practice. AI flagging missing disclosures sounds good. But the FTC’s creator disclosure requirements are nuanced. What counts as a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure varies by platform format. I’d want to see this tested on actual edge cases before trusting it as a compliance check.

Devotion vs. the Legacy Approach

The traditional influencer marketing agency model is: brand briefs agency, agency maintains talent relationships, agency executes and reports back. You pay a 20-30% management fee, you have limited visibility into what’s actually happening, and you’re dependent on the agency’s existing roster.

Devotion is pitching an alternative: brand owns the creator relationships and the data, software handles the operations, your internal team makes the strategic calls. The agency is replaced by software plus a smaller brand operator team.

For brands that have already built out a creator team internally, this is a compelling model. You get the speed and data ownership without the agency markup. For brands still figuring out their creator strategy and relying on agency expertise: Devotion isn’t for you. It assumes you already know what you’re doing and just need the operational layer.

That’s worth being clear about. This isn’t a tool for someone who’s new to influencer marketing. It’s infrastructure for brands that have already proven the channel works and are hitting operational ceilings.

How This Fits the Broader Creator Economy Shift

The 2026 creator economy data shows that the middle class of creators is real and growing—84.7% posting more than once per week, 51.5% growing earnings year-over-year. That’s a massive pool of working creators that brands have barely scratched.

What Devotion is building against is the reality that accessing that pool at scale has been operationally impossible for most brand teams. You can find 200 creators who might work. You cannot manage 200 creator relationships in a spreadsheet without your quality control falling apart.

The AI tools reshaping creator workflows are mostly creator-side: script drafting, thumbnail ideation, auto-captions, SEO research. Devotion is brand-side. That’s a gap nobody is filling well yet.

The LinkedIn BrandLink launch and platform-native creator monetization programs are giving brands more channels to manage, not fewer. That pressure makes the operational argument for a tool like Devotion stronger over time, not weaker.

The Bottom Line

Devotion is a real product solving a real problem for a specific customer. If you’re a brand running 100+ creator relationships monthly and your current process involves spreadsheets, Slack threads, and a coordinator who is definitely underpaid for what they’re managing: put this on your radar.

The timing is smart, and the founders have actual scar tissue here—Tellez ran this problem at Parade, Kroopf built creator programs at TikTok. That’s a rare combination for a seed-stage startup.

The caveats are real too. Day-one software tackling a genuinely hard operational problem is going to have rough edges. Pricing opacity means you can’t evaluate ROI without getting into a sales process first. And the creator-side experience—whether the good creators actually want to work through Devotion or prefer direct relationships—isn’t something you can assess from the outside yet.

Watch the next 90 days. If Devotion’s 10 beta clients renew and the revenue grows, the thesis is working. If the brand team starts publishing case studies with actual performance numbers, even better.

For now: worth a demo if you’re the right customer. Too early to commit if you’re not already sold on the volume-creator model.

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Devotion launched publicly on March 2, 2026. Funding and revenue figures from the company’s launch announcement. Platform details from public interviews with co-founders Cami Tellez and Jon Kroopf. Creator engagement metrics referenced from publicly reported Devotion workflows.