He dropped out of Columbia University after receiving a one-year suspension for his first tech product, Interview Coder, which “enables the use of AI on LeetCode-style technical interviews without being detected.” He admitted to lying about 7 million in annual funding that he told TechCrunch he received. He believes that “most startups flop because their products don’t get seen” and that the secret to success in the tech industry is virality. His company raised a total of $ 21.3 million in funding.

He is Chungin “Roy” Lee, and at just 22, he is already wildly successful. Lee’s tech start-up “Cluely” has 482,000 followers on Instagram, with its viral short-form content generating millions of views per video. Cluely’s website boasts that it sells the “#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings” that can “[take] perfect meeting notes and [give] real-time answers” without being detected. It offers three monthly plans, starting at free and ending at a whopping $149.99/month.

Three different Cluely plans. Source: Cluely.com.

Cluely is proudly AI-driven, featuring meeting notes, transcriptions, and fast response times. But how did a start-up created by a Columbia dropout secure so much funding? To find out, we must go back in time.

In 2025, he was an undergraduate at Columbia “using AI to do essentially all his work for him,” and he has stated that “he was there to find someone to co-found a startup with,” rather than to learn. That someone was “[an] engineering student named Neel Shanmugam,” and together they created Interview Coder, “a transparent window that could overlay one side of a Zoom meeting, allowing Claude to listen in on the questions and provide answers.”

The co-founders of Cluely. Source: TechCrunch

Interview Coder went viral after Lee “posted a YouTube video of himself on Feb. 7 using the program during his Amazon internship interview.” He claims to have received job offers from Amazon, Meta, TikTok, and Capital One through the techniques displayed in that video. After Columbia was made aware of the video, Lee and Shanmugam were both subject to disciplinary action and later, both dropped out.

Later on, Lee kickstarted a viral, controversial marketing campaign that offered “its users the chance to “cheat” on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews.” The highlight of said campaign was a launch video that featured “Lee using a hidden AI assistant to (unsuccessfully) lie to a woman about his age, and even his knowledge of art, on a date at a fancy restaurant.”

After two rounds of fundraising, Cluely raised $20.3 million total. The money was sourced from a $15 million Series A round (a start-up’s first major financing) from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a total seed round of $5.3 million from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures.

For the first six months or so of its lifetime, Cluely was based in San Francisco. However, the company soon decided to relocate to New York City, “because it’s illegal to live and work in the building, which is zoned as office space [in San Francisco].” When the San Francisco Standard visited Cluely’s office in July of 2025, “six employees lived in the building, while nearly a dozen others, as well as content creators, were being put up across the street.”

The inside of Cluely’s San Francisco office. Source: The San Francisco Standard.

On his personal Instagram account, which has 463,000 followers, Lee has frequently expressed controversial and divisive opinions. He has stated that he will only take advice from someone younger, fitter, richer, and more handsome than he is. He advises against starting companies like clothing lines, and instead believes that software start-ups are the way forward. He also believes that having a Human Resources Department will only weaken his company. However, Lee has also said that being honest will make some people dislike you, and therefore he feels unaffected by internet criticism.

Roy Lee, CEO and co-founder of tech start-up Cluely. Source: Chosun. 

In a similarly controversial vein, Lee has been accused of “using ‘ragebaiting’ marketing tactics with his company’s tagline, ‘Cheat on everything.’” Speaking on the third and final day of the annual tech conference TechCrunch Disrupt at San Francisco’s Moscone Center Wednesday, Lee declared: “I think I’m particularly good at framing myself in a way that’s controversial. Honestly, I don’t think I ragebait, really. I think I’m just honest and authentic and I think people just see that as ragebaiting, because they get enraged, but it’s probably just my personality.”

At least some of his company and himself’s controversy seems to attract virality. Many start-ups flop despite having a specific market niche, Lee reasons, because they simply fail to be seen. “There’s a bunch of shallow replicas, but I challenge you to find one video you think is like, ‘Yo, this is as tough as Cluely,’” he told TechCrunch. Lee wants Cluely to be the biggest thing on internet platforms like Instagram and TikTok, as he has previously said on a podcast. “Every single big company is known by regular people,” he added.

Cluely’s interest over time graph. Source: Google Trends.

Will Cluely one day become a household name like Apple or Google? Only time can tell. But in its short history and in Roy Lee’s time in the spotlight, it has already generated dialogue and controversy. His company readily embraces ever-improving AI technology and uses the Internet as its primary platform for advertising. Whatever the case, Cluely is a product and a reflection of the modern digital age.