Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee admitted to X on Thursday that the $7 million in annual recurring revenue he revealed to TechCrunch last summer was a lie. “This is the only blatantly dishonest statement I’ve made publicly online, so this is my official retraction,” Lee wrote.
But his post about X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he communicated ARR to TechCrunch in the first place.
“A woman asked me for my phone number and told me some nasty things, but I didn’t expect to see an article about it,” Lee said in the same post.
But the call came about because Cluely’s publicist emailed TechCrunch, requesting that Lee be available for an interview. On Friday, June 27, 2025, at 8:38 a.m., a Cluely spokesperson sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin saying, “We would like to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether it’s to dig deeper into the next steps for Cluely or to get a new perspective on his vision, we would be happy to make it happen.”
Temkin agreed. A spokesperson shared Lee’s phone number and confirmed that she is waiting for a call. After several attempts to reach him, Lee answered the phone as scheduled and agreed to an interview.
TechCrunch was interested in speaking with Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was a “cheat-everything” phenomenon, a viral startup that allowed users to secretly search for answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Mr. Lee and his co-founder published a post on X that went viral about how they had been suspended from Columbia University for developing a tool to cheat in interviews for software engineers.
The co-founders raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely, with the intention of commercializing the tool that led to its shutdown. This was positioned to allow online interviewees (or anyone) to secretly search for answers to questions without being detected. For a while, it seemed as if Cluely’s huge success would spawn an anti-industry of detection tools designed to catch people using Cluely.
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In June, Cluley raised $15 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. By then, the company had mastered the art of using stunts to create provocative content designed to go viral to keep Cluely in the headlines and attract new users. The strategy became the talk of the town. Lee also discussed how the rage-baiting marketing strategy was successful in acquiring early customers at TechCrunch’s 2025 Disrupt event in October.
At the time, he declined to share the latest revenue numbers, but said marketing alone is not enough to build a sustainable business when the product is still in flux. “What I learned is to never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.
Cluely has since rebranded itself as an AI-powered meeting note-taking tool. But by admitting to lying on Thursday and posting the numbers from his Stripe account, Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice.
