Cluely

Market position

Cluely positions itself as an "undetectable" real-time meeting assistant that helps during a call rather than summarizing afterwards, and by late 2025 was competing with conventional AI notetakers such as Otter.ai. It became one of the most publicized AI startups of 2025, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures, with two unnamed investors telling TechCrunch its post-money valuation was around $120 million after the Series A, a figure neither the company nor a16z confirmed.

The product's stated differentiators are real-time in-call assistance rather than post-meeting summaries, and concealment: it does not join meetings as a bot and does not appear in screen shares, recordings or external meeting tools. Concealment during screen sharing is sold as a separate premium tier.

Technology

A desktop overlay application that captures screen content and system audio in real time and passes context to large language models to produce answers, notes and next steps. The overlay is engineered to be excluded from screen shares, recordings and external meeting tools, and the assistant operates without joining the call as a participant bot. The company reports live transcription in over 12 languages at a stated 300 ms response time and 95% accuracy, with hotkey-triggered assistance (Cmd/Ctrl + Enter). Journalist testing at launch found response latency of 5 to 90 seconds.

Go-to-market

Growth has been driven by founder-led social media and stunt marketing, including a launch video in which Lee used the tool on a date, an attempted after-party following Y Combinator's AI Startup School that police stopped after about 2,000 people arrived, and a program to hire 50 "growth interns" each required to post four TikToks per day. Lee stated a goal of reaching 1 billion total views across social platforms. Distribution is via direct download for macOS and Windows and an App Store mobile app, with a self-serve free tier converting into paid subscriptions and a parallel enterprise sales motion.

Individual professionals using video meetings, plus enterprise buyers; the CEO has cited sales representatives, customer support teams and call centers as prominent use cases, and early marketing targeted job interviews, exams and sales calls.

Geography

Founded and initially based in San Francisco, with headquarters relocated to New York City; the area served is primarily the United States.

History

The company was incorporated in 2025 and officially launched on April 20, 2025, recording 70,000 signups in its first week. It announced a $5.3 million seed round co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures on April 21, 2025, and a $15 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz on June 20, 2025, bringing total funding to $20.3 million. Explicit references to cheating on exams and interviews were removed from the website in late April 2025, and by November 2025 the company had repositioned as a standard AI meeting assistant. In late 2025 Cluely said it would move its headquarters from San Francisco's SoMa district to New York City after a zoning violation at a live-work residential property where several employees had been living and working. In March 2026, Lee acknowledged that the $7 million ARR figure he had cited to TechCrunch in 2025 was untrue, posting screenshots on X indicating $5.2 million.

Risks & controversies

The company's launch marketing explicitly promoted cheating on job interviews, exams and personal interactions, drawing widespread criticism before the references were scrubbed from the website. Its founders were suspended from Columbia University over the predecessor Interview Coder tool. Independent reviews at launch found the product slow and generic. A zoning violation at its San Francisco live-work property preceded the move to New York. In March 2026 the CEO publicly admitted having lied about the company's revenue figures. An attempted large public event was shut down by police, and the reported $120 million valuation remains unconfirmed by the company or its lead investor.