The $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee admissible on Thursday at X. Lee wrote, this “is the only blatantly dishonest thing I’ve said publicly on the internet, so this is my official retraction.”
However, his X post also misrepresents the story of how and why he told TechCrunch his ARR in the first place.
Lee says in the same post that he “got a random cold call from some woman asking about numbers and told her some bs, wasn’t expecting an article about that.”
But that call came about because Cluely’s PR rep emailed TechCrunch and offered to make Lee available for a story. On Friday, June 27, 2025 at 8:38 AM, Cluely’s PR manager sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin that said, “I would love to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether for a deeper dive into the next phase of Cluely or a new angle, we’d be happy to make it happen.”
Temkin agreed. The PR representative shared Lee’s number and confirmed that he was waiting for the call. After a few attempts to reach him, Lee answered the call and gave the interview, as arranged.
TechCrunch was interested in talking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the cheat-on-everything phenomenon — a viral startup that allowed users to secretly search for answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Lee published a viral post on X saying he had been suspended from Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat at 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 set up to allow online interviewers (or anyone) to secretly look for answers to questions without detection. For a while, it looked like Cluely would be 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 have been in getting early customers at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2025 event in October.
He declined to share updated revenue numbers at the time, but indicated that marketing alone, when a product is still in flux, is not enough to build a sustainable business. “What I’ve learned is that you should never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.
Cluely has since been rebranded as an AI-powered meeting notebook. But by admitting the lie on Thursday and posting numbers from his Stripe account, Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice.
