Building Cluely

Roy Lee and cofounder Neel Shanmugam launched Cluely in April 2025, an AI-powered overlay for your desktop, providing answers to all your interview, exam and sales questions. The company promised to let you "cheat on everything". They released a launch video, in which Lee demonstrated how he used Cluely to pull off a date with an ai assistant, the video became a hit.

Cluely started raising money right away. A series of fundraising rounds gathered $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. Two months later, Andreessen Horowitz led a $15 million as Series A for the company that was valued at $120 million.

When it came to building the team, Lee hired 11 people overall, including four engineers and 7 "growth" specialists. To join in the latter category, one had to have 100k followers on social media already. This way, Cluely employed more than 60 full-time creators who were generating content for the company's social media accounts every day.

Virality

Even as Cluely began to take off, issues kept coming. Various companies started creating tools designed to detect Cluely-cheating, and journalists began asking tough questions about the startup's capabilities. By mid-2025, Cluely was already pulling back, removing any mention of cheating from its website. Instead it proposed to help with sales calls and meetings.

At the end of the second year, at Tech Crunch Event, Roy admitted that the overall vision wasn't working. In the conference, he announced that they probably had launched too soon, but they only wanted to ship a bare minimum product that would evolve from there.

The Fall of Cluely

On March 5th , 2026, Lee uploaded a post publicly humiliating himself on social media. He admitted that Tech Crunch's questioning on the $7 million revenue he announced in the summer of 2025 was right and that this was the only lie he ever told on the internet publicly. Further he published his stripe dashboard, proving that he only had $5.2 million ARR of revenue that year.

Lee responded in no uncertain terms, publishing a 2-minute long monolog, admitting that the revenue was "fractionally wrong". The post got way more views than the original Tech Crunch article. From that point on, Cluely presented itself as an AI Assistant instead of "cheat on everything AI Tool" like they used to.

Whatever Happened

Cluely's currently continues to sell its desktop cheating overlay, although it does not seem to be the company's selling point anymore.

The majority of attention is now brought to the sister application Bounty that offers rewards for its promotional videos. According to the cluely team, nearly a million dollars have already been paid to creators for videos showcasing various "Cluely Brands".

Cluely is capitalizing on its network of content creators to promote other products as well. Also there is a comedy series about "Cluely office culture" being posted as skits on Tik Tok and Instagram. Fire drills, intern training, and Ling Long can be seen in the series.