Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year

Lee admitted Thursday on X that the $7 million in annual recurring revenue that Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie.

However, his post on X also misrepresents the backstory of how and why he told TechCrunch ARR in the first place.

In the same post, Lee says he “got a random call from a woman asking for numbers and I told her a few things I wasn’t expecting an article about.”

But that call happened because a PR representative for Cluely emailed TechCrunch and offered to make Lee available for a story. On Friday, June 27, 2025 at 8:38 a.m., Cluely’s PR lead sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin in which he said: “I’d like to arrange an interview with Roy. Whether it’s to dive deeper into the next phase of Cluely or a new angle on his vision, we’d be happy to make it happen.”

Temkin agreed. The PR representative shared my number and confirmed that he was expecting the call. After several attempts to contact him, Lee answered the call and conducted the interview, as had been arranged.

TechCrunch was interested in speaking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was the “cheat in 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 made a viral post on X saying he had been suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed an interview-cheating tool for software engineers.

The founders raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely, aiming to commercialize the tool that led to their suspension. It is positioned as allowing online interviewees (or anyone) to secretly search for answers to questions without being detected. For a while, it looked like Cluely would become so successful that it would spawn 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 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 Taste of Rage marketing tactics were in gaining early customers at TechCrunch’s 2025 Disrupt event in October.

He declined to share updated revenue numbers at the time, but noted that marketing alone, when the 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 rebranded itself as an AI-powered meeting note-taking tool. But in admitting to the lie on Thursday and posting the numbers from his Stripe account, Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice.