Startup by Columbia Cheater Secures $5.3M Deal
On 21 Sunday, Chungin “Roy” Lee; age 21; announced that he has managed to raise $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for his startup, Cluely, which sells an AI tool that claims to allow people “to cheat on everything.”
The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that Columbia University suspended him after he and his co-founder developed a tool for cheating in job interviews for software engineers.
That tool, once dubbed Interview Coder, has found its new home in a startup based in San Francisco called Cluely. It allows users to “cheat” on things such as exams, sales calls, and job interviews using a secret in-browser window that cannot be seen by either the interviewer or test giver.
Cluely has released a manifesto comparing itself to creations like the calculator and spellcheck, inventions which were at first denounced as “cheating.”
Cluely also released a stylish yet contentious launch video in which Lee uses a hidden AI assistant to, unsuccessfully, lie to a woman about his age, and even about his very knowledge of art, on a date in a fancy restaurant:
Watch how it works. Click here
Some called it a very good “grabber,” but very many others felt that it smacked of dystopian sci-fi TV show “Black Mirror”:
Lee, who is Cluely’s CEO, told TechCrunch that the AI cheating tool just crossed more than USD 3 million in ARR earlier this month.
The other co-founder of the startup is Neel Shanmugam, 21, and the COO of Cluely, who formerly attended Columbia. Shanmugam was embroiled in disciplinary action at Columbia University due to the AI tool. Both co-founders reportedly dropped out of Columbia, as per the university’s student newspaper last week. Columbia declined to comment as the case involves student privacy laws.
Cluely was originally designed as a tool for developers to cheat on their knowledge of LeetCode, which is the go-to platform for coding questions that some in software engineering circles, including Cluely’s founders, of course, consider obsolete and certainly not worthy of someone’s precious time.
According to Lee, he managed to get an internship at Amazon after using the AI cheating tool. Amazon, however, denied commenting on Lee’s specific condition to TechCrunch but said that applicants must acknowledge they will not use unauthorized tools during the interview process.
Cluely is not the only one to launch a front-page-grabbing AI startup during the month. Earlier, another famous AI researcher made the news of starting up his company with a declared intent of replacing all human workers everywhere for yet another hullabaloo on X.
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