Cluely didn’t just enter the AI arena. It crashed through the front door wearing shades and a smirk.
Two 21-year-old former Columbia students, Chungin “Roy” Lee and Neel Shanmugam, turned what looked like academic infamy into startup fuel. They built Interview Coder in early 2024, a tool so disruptive it triggered suspensions and disciplinary hearings. Then, like any good origin story, they turned exile into evolution. Cluely was born.
Today? Cluely is a fully-funded, fully-operational beast based in San Francisco, armed with a $5.3M seed round from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. No preamble. No bridge round. Just pure ARR momentum and a platform too sharp to ignore.
Their product is an undetectable, in-browser AI assistant that whispers the right answer at the right time, whether you’re bombing a coding interview, dodging a tough question in sales, or staring down a digital exam. This thing watches your screen, listens to your audio, and feeds you in-context prompts invisible to anyone else. Real-time superpowers that play nice with Zoom, Teams, Meet, and whatever else your calendar throws at you.
And let’s talk numbers. $3M in ARR within weeks. 70,000 users. 12 million views. All before their official launch in April 2025. That’s not growth. That’s ignition.
Chungin “Roy” Lee, suspended for allegedly leaking his disciplinary hearing, is now Cluely’s CEO. He cut his teeth at Nucleus Genomics, co-founded ComplianceRight, and spent late nights running research at Berkeley. Neel Shanmugam, now COO, went deep in biotech, ML, and product engineering. Between stints at SpringWorks Therapeutics, AvoMD, and Rilla, he built a track record that doesn’t need dressing up. These two Z Fellows didn’t just drop out, they dropped into something bigger.
Cluely’s secret sauce isn’t just tech. It’s timing, audacity, and a product built unapologetically for the edge. With GPT40 mini, Claude 37, and enterprise access to GPT Enterprise, their platform operates faster than you can blink, under 100ms, to be exact. And yes, it’s invisible to screen recordings and proctoring tools. This isn’t cheating. It’s evolution.
They’re not just building tools. They’re challenging the very definition of “help.” Spellcheck was once scandalous. So was the calculator. Cluely? It’s just next.
And if you’re wondering what they’re doing with that $5.3M, try locking down a $500K SF office and offering $200/hour internships (yes, you read that right). They’re hiring. They’re scaling. And they’re gunning to become the fastest company to $100M ARR in history.
So the question isn’t whether Cluely’s controversial. The question is, how long before this becomes the new normal?
Congrats to Chungin “Roy” Lee and Neel Shanmugam on turning Cluely into the AI whisperer we didn’t know we needed, but now can’t stop watching.
