The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with News last summer was a lie, Lee admitted on Thursday on X. Wrote Lee, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing i’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.”
Yet his post on X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he told News his ARR in the first place.
Lee says in that same post that he “got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, did not expect an article about it.”
But that call occurred because Cluely’s public relations representative emailed News and offered to make Lee available for a story. On Friday, Jun 27, 2025 at 8:38 a.m., Cluely’s PR person sent an email to News reporter Marina Temkin that said, “I’d love to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether for a deeper dive into Cluely’s next phase or a fresh angle on his vision, we’d be happy to make it happen.”
Temkin agreed. The PR representative shared Lee’s number and confirmed that he was expecting the call. After a few attempts to reach him, Lee answered the call and gave the interview, as had been arranged.
News was interested in talking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the “cheat-on-everything” phenomenon — a viral startup that let users secretly look up answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Lee published a viral post on X saying he had been suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers.
The co-founders raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely, intending to commercialize the tool that got them suspended. It was positioned as allowing online interviewees (or anyone) to secretly look up answers to questions without detection. For a while, it seemed like Cluely would become so successful that it would spawn a counter-industry of detection tools designed to catch people using it.
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In June, Cluely raised a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. By then, the company had mastered the art of creating provocative content designed to go viral using stunts to keep Cluely in the headlines and attract new users. The strategy was the talk of the town. Lee even discussed how successful rage-bait marketing tactics were for gaining early customers at News’s 2025 Disrupt event in October.
He declined to share updated revenue numbers at that time, but he did indicate that marketing alone, when a product is still in flux, isn’t enough to build a sustainable business. “What I’ve learned is you should never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.
Cluely has since rebranded itself as an AI-powered meeting note-taker. But in admitting the lie on Thursday and posting numbers from his Stripe account, Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice.
