The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee disclosed to TechCrunch last summer was fabricated, Lee confessed on Thursday on X. He wrote, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing I’ve said publicly online, so this is my formal retraction.”
However, his post on X also distorts the history of how and why he shared the ARR with TechCrunch.
Lee claims in the 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 happened because Cluely’s public relations representative emailed TechCrunch proposing to make Lee available for a feature. On Friday, June 27, 2025, at 8:38 a.m., Cluely’s PR person emailed TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin saying, “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 provided Lee’s number and confirmed his readiness for the call. After a few tries, Lee answered the call and participated in the interview as planned.
TechCrunch wanted to speak with Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the “cheat-on-everything” trend — a viral startup enabling users to discreetly find answers during video calls without detection. The company originated after Lee published a viral post on X claiming he had been suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on software engineer job interviews.
The co-founders secured $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely, aiming to commercialize the tool that caused their suspension. It was marketed as a way for online interviewees (or anyone) to covertly find answers without being caught. For a while, it seemed like Cluely would become so successful that it would lead to a counter-industry of detection tools designed to catch people using it.
In June, Cluely raised a $15 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. By then, the company had perfected the art of creating attention-grabbing content using stunts and sensational claims to keep Cluely in the news and draw new users. The approach was widely discussed. Lee even elaborated on the success of rage-bait marketing techniques for acquiring initial customers at TechCrunch’s 2025 Disrupt event in October.
He declined to provide updated revenue figures at that time but indicated that marketing alone, when a product is still developing, isn’t sufficient to establish a sustainable business. “What I’ve learned is you should never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.
Cluely has since rebranded as an AI-powered meeting note-taker. Yet, by admitting the falsehood and sharing figures from his Stripe account, Lee seems to have disregarded his own advice.