Cluely

Roy Lee

Suspended from Columbia, he turned the controversy into Cluely.

Self-reported figure

~$5M ARR

Cluely (corrected figure)

Launched

2025

Age at launch

01Started from

Where it started

Columbia student, suspended after building Interview Coder, a tool for cheating at engineering interviews.

Tech level: Developer (computer science student)
Starting money: Not disclosed
How it was built: Co-founded with Neel Shanmugam on real-time AI models; growth came from deliberately provocative "rage-bait" marketing.
Funding: $5.3M seed (Abstract, Susa), then a $15M Series A from a16z in June 2025.
Tools: LLMs / real-time AI

02Journey

At Columbia
Interview Coder
He builds a tool to cheat at engineering interviews. The scandal gets him suspended and makes him known.
2025
Cluely
At 21, he co-founds Cluely: an invisible AI assistant that feeds answers in real time during interviews, meetings and sales calls.
June 2025
Series A
After a $5.3M seed, a16z puts in a $15M Series A. ARR is around $5M, consumer and enterprise combined.
March 2026
Corrected figure
He publicly admits the "$7M ARR" he had announced was a lie. The corrected, estimated figure is ~$5M ARR.

03Lessons

01
Controversy buys attention but costs trust: Cluely had to correct its own numbers.
02
Only share revenue you can prove: a public retraction follows you.
03
Target a moment people already live (an interview, a call) so they get the use case instantly.

“Every single person who has a meeting or an interview is testing this out.”

Roy Lee · TechCrunch (juil. 2025)

Figures come from public sources (press, the founders’ own posts) and are sometimes self-reported.