DEEP DIVE: Cluely Raises $15M From a16z
Roy Lee, Founder & CEO shares all, directly on Sourcery
Today it’s cheating, tomorrow it’s fair.
With over 5.4M+ views on X, so far, Roy Lee, Founder & CEO of Cluely, announced Friday their $15M fundraise from Andreessen Horowitz to build what they call the most viral AI startup in the world.
Reaching over 1.2M+ views on X, our post interviewing Roy to broke down their whole fundraise process, product, their highly profitable business model, the controversial stunt marketing playbook (including their hot topic stunt with a stripper — more on that below), their provocative brand personality, and what it means to scale an AI product with top tier creator-led GTM growth.
→ Listen on X, Spotify, YouTube, Apple
With over $20M in total funding, Cluely is building real-time, undetectable screen overlays, rethinking how AI should show up in your workflow. And they’re doing it profitably. Cluely last announced their $5.3M Seed round in April 2025, co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures.
Whether you think they’re brilliant or reckless, this is one of the most fascinating startup stories in tech right now.
Special thank you to Toms of Roam for helping me prep with some great questions, & to Founders Inc. for the last minute studio space (Roy founded Cluely there).
Top 9 clips from the interview + write up on Cluely’s story below 👇
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Highlights
00:00 - Roy Lee, Cluely
00:35 - $15M Led by a16z
02:21 - Cluely’s Mega Viral Launch & Fundraise
08:17 - Product Overview & Vision
16:39 - Brex: Business Model & Profitability
21:10 - Stunt Marketing & Virality
27:05 - Controversies & Criticism
28:09 - Will Roy Go To Jail?
29:54 - Selling to Enterprise
33:58 - Team Dynamics & 50 Interns
46:36 - Leadership Challenges & Personal Reflections
51:09 - Kalshi: Predictions & Future Outlook
Top 9 Cluely Clips
Raising $15 Million From a16z
With $20M+ in total funding, and this recent $15M in fresh capital led by Andreessen Horowitz, Roy humbly shares his experience raising from VCs. TLDR, the round was pre-empted just weeks after the founding team relocated to California, underscoring the pace and conviction with which top firms are moving to secure exposure to high-growth AI companies.
“They just pre-empted and asked, ‘Hey, do you want more money?’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ It just happened,” said Roy.
Which helped shape Roy’s direct take on ‘how easy it is’ to raise venture capital:
“If you’re ever worried about, like, oh, the next round, bro, think about your current round, think about your current company. You need more money right now. Just swing big.”
“There’s nothing that pisses me off more than when some investor wants to talk to me, they send me an email like, ‘yo, I’m trying to talk,’ and then they f*cking loop in their assistant to schedule some time. Like bro, these rounds are closing in like, hours... If you want to talk to the hottest startup, then you need to f*cking book time ASAP.”
“If you're not moving fast, you miss out.”
P.S. It’s typically not that easy 😅
Terms to Know:
Bro - a term of endearment, a friend
Bet - “for sure,” “I agree”
Brex - how Cluely spends money on everything
Algo Pull - someone who has strong influence on social media timelines
Viral Sense - to know what will hit, go viral, good taste in understanding the consumer
Conqueror of the Universe - Roy Lee
“Conqueror of the Universe”
Roy’s ambitions are neither subtle nor conventional. In one of the more talked-about moments from recent interviews, he stated:
“My ultimate dream... is all companies will converge into one, two, maybe three super companies. And maybe 50 years from now, it'll be me vs Elon vs Sam [Altman] competing for the title of Conqueror of the Universe.”
This ambition manifests in nearly every decision Cluely makes: preemptive rounds, maximalist marketing, compressed hiring cycles, a refusal to compromise on speed or tone. This is not a startup aiming to just be an AI plugin, it’s trying to own the interface layer for work itself and create a cultural movement. The company doesn’t believe in iterating its way to relevance. It’s engineered to blitzscale attention until Cluely becomes synonymous with ambient AI.
From a venture lens, this type of founder-market fit, high technical leverage paired with extreme ambition and cultural fluency, makes Cluely a particularly asymmetric bet. It’s not a guaranteed outcome. But if the company does hit escape velocity, this early-stage narrative will likely become a key part of how it’s mythologized. This type of binary outcome, though extremely loud, is what venture risk was made for, insane ambition, long term vision, and hopefully, a large exit. If not, & Cluely fails, he will probably be backed for his next company (many such examples).
“We made a cultural moment. And I think tracking that stuff [conversion] is like pretty meaningless eventually.”
But What is Cluely?
Cluely is building a new kind of AI interface—an ambient desktop layer that feeds users real-time responses during high-context tasks like sales calls, interviews, or deep work. Rather than asking users to alt-tab into a chatbot, Cluely sits on top of the screen, listens to audio, sees what the user sees, and delivers instant help.
“No other tool feeds answers to reps without anyone knowing. We do that,” said Roy. The product can surface definitions, talking points, and answers mid-call via simple keyboard prompts, enhancing performance in real-time.
Enterprise adoption is rising quickly, especially among customer support and call center teams that require contextual, undetectable assistance. “The most interesting use case is call centers,” Roy noted. With large contracts already in place, Cluely now makes more revenue from enterprise than consumer, even as its creator-driven awareness grows on the consumer side.
How Did Roy Get Here?
“I was here at Founders Inc, like a couple months back, and we [Co-Founder Neel Shanmugam] were working on this, AI sales agent for, for liquor distributors. And it was like, the most bullsh*t, like B2B, talk to your customers. Ideally, it was so stupid. I had nothing to do with it.
Like had nothing to do with me as a founder, just wasn't working. And the only thing that ever worked was this really sh*tty LinkedIn demo we made one day, that had 600,000 views, and it was for a tool called Interview Coder. And like the second it went viral, like it sort of captured my heart, but it was it was like the most dangerous.
This is like the cheating tool. We sort of saw the vision for the marketing. We said we knew if we use this for a bunch of Amazon like, like fake interviews and got the offer, then this will go super viral. But we didn't have the balls to do it, until everything stopped working.
And at a certain point, you know, I'm sitting there with like a 2.3 GPA. My counselor's on my ass and I'm like, okay, you know what? Let's go revisit the one thing that made me excited that was Interview Coder.
So I doubled down. I did all the marketing sh*t that I plan on doing, and it went super viral. And after a certain point, I mean, I built this cheating tool. I got kicked out of school.
I get blacklisted from Amazon, like, what can I do but f*cking raise a round and go to California? I burned every other bridge except this. And now, this is like the what? The one path that's left for me. The dream, bro. Like, who doesn't want to be out there building companies?”
UX of The Future: Liquid Glass Design
Everything Cluely now does, context awareness, invisible UI, embedded prompts, was first prototyped through Interview Coder. “Cluely right now looks very similar to what Interview Coder looked like.”
The product design draws from the founder’s firsthand frustration with chat-based AI: “The chatbot is the wrong interface. What you want is a translucent, integrated assistant.” Cluely is pursuing the “liquid glass” vision for workflow-native AI.
The overlay is intentionally minimal and semi-transparent, allowing users to work without obstruction. It's also undetectable during screen sharing, giving it an edge for live calls, interviews, and stealth use cases.
Sound familiar? Apple just launched their “liquid glass” product at WWDC (receiving a lot of backlash, it didn’t go so well, but made for many funny X posts & memes).
“I think everybody's approaching this, and understands that this is the UX of the future. It's just a land grab to see who can, capture it first.
‘But why is that? The UX of the future?’
You don't want a separate app because it should not feel like a separate window. It's not a separate window to feel like a seamless integration into everything you're doing. It should feel like an overlay. It should work.
You shouldn't have to go to your workflow, go to another AI app, and then go back to your workflow. This is the exact problem that Cursor solved. And, they ended up making like, f*cking billions and billions of dollars. Like, what you want to do is you want to have AI integrated inside your workflow, not just one workflow, but every workflow.
And it is inevitable that the models will get intelligent enough to do this when they do. Like what does it actually look like to have a seamless, integrated AI? I think right now we're the closest UX out there.”
Creator-Led Distribution as Moat
What makes Cluely particularly unique is that its moat isn’t technical IP or proprietary models, it’s distribution. Roy is explicit: “If distribution is the most important thing, we’re the best distributing tech startup in the world right now.”
Cluely leans fully into creator-led marketing, running a content engine of over 50+ UGC creators. It manages them through an in-house CRM designed to scale toward 2,000 contributors.
Cluely’s marketing stunts include:
Facebook ‘Social Network’ fundraise video
Controversial post on X ft a stripper
Spending $500K on a live-in office
Infamous “cheat on everything” tagline
They’ve been polarizing, but effective. The strategy is not without risk, but the team believes attention compounds faster than technical differentiation.
One of Roy’s clearest influences is Friend.com, the viral launch with 24M+ views from Avi Schiffman. “We must have watched his launch video like 100 times before we decided on the launch,” Roy said. “This is what we modeled it after. You can literally see, even the framing and positioning and timing of the text… like all that was copied off.” For Roy, Friend.com proved that cinematic, controversial demos could generate tens of millions of views and still be wildly effective in tech.
Yet he was surprised that no one followed the formula: “He gave us the f*cking playbook, bro. Just nobody decides to do it.” Roy’s interpretation is that fear of reputational risk holds most founders back, but if you can push through, as Friend.com did, you create something that breaks out of the tech echo chamber and into culture.
Controversy & Criticism
What Cluely is doing isn’t new, it’s just rarely been done in tech. Roy is pulling from a well-worn YouTuber playbook from Jake & Logan Paul to MrBeast: build a personality-driven content engine, manufacture controversy, and ride the algorithm until you're too culturally entrenched to ignore.
“How many controversies have they been in?” he says of Logan and Jake Paul. “And they just keep f*cking muscling through… eventually everyone just knows them.”
What’s different is that Roy is applying this model to a venture-backed AI company with institutional investors like Andreessen Horowitz. That’s where the real risk lies, attaching high-profile capital to a strategy that’s designed to provoke, polarize, and grow through friction. Most founders wouldn’t dare run this play with a cap table full of blue-chip firms. Cluely is betting the upside, mindshare, talent magnetism, and distribution dominance, outweighs the brand volatility. Hopefully, Roy escapes jail.
“Virality means nothing if you can’t do it consistently. But if you can, it makes you untouchable.”
Highly Profitable
Cluely’s product is already monetizing on both consumer and enterprise fronts. The consumer plan starts at $20/month, while the company has signed multiple enterprise deals in the seven-figure range, particularly in customer service and call center verticals. Today, Cluely is profitable and growing quickly, with revenue outpacing headcount growth.
“Since day one, we've been profitable and, the growth has just been so fast. Like Interview Coder, before we hired anyone, hit like $3M ARR and then we started hiring people.”
Spend Big, Move Big, Make Big Moves
Roy is candid about how Cluely operates financially, lean, fast, and optimized for leverage. A key part of that playbook is Brex. “I use Brex for everything. I use as much of their rewards as possible.” he says.
The company runs all of its spend through Brex cards, from team operations to paid media, in order to maximize rewards.
“Brex has been a life saver. There's no other company that would let us spend $50,000 a month on food.”
That food budget is not trivial, Cluely spends over $50,000 a month on food alone to keep the team moving fast and co-located.
“We will literally spend like $50,000 a month on DoorDash and random food just so we like, like spend more time, like spend less time cooking because everyone is more efficient. We can like, grow the product faster that way. Like, I do not care about the money.”
Roy’s philosophy on financial velocity is clear:
“Spend big, move big, make big moves.”
For Cluely, Brex isn’t just a credit card; it’s infrastructure. It gives the team centralized control over budget categories, simplifies accounting for creator campaigns, and earns points that are directly reinvested into speed.
In a company that sees velocity as its main advantage, Brex becomes a financial OS fueling the machine at the pace Roy expects. The choice to consolidate spending on a single platform echoes the same mindset behind their product: remove friction, gain leverage, move faster.
Hiring A Viral Team
Cluely’s team is laser-focused on two goals: building the product or making it go viral. “You’re either building the product or you’re making the product go viral,” Roy said. Hiring prioritizes top talent in these areas: “If you’re not excellent at one of two things, then you’re probably not going to get hired.” From engineers to creators, the team thrives on bold creativity, brainstorming daily to push boundaries. “Everyone is on board with the craziness,” Roy emphasized, reflecting a culture that embraces risk and innovation.
With only 11 employees (4 eng + 7 growth), Roy reveals their simple hiring criteria:
min 100,000+ followers
engineer or influencer
must live in the office
viral sense & strong algo pull
"There is no work-life balance. Your entire life is Cluely & your entire work is Cluely"
"You're either a world-class engineer or you're a world-class influencer with high algo pull. There's nobody who's not a great engineer who has less than 100,000 followers"
"When when when you scroll enough you just know the same people tend to pop up. Recently you see the same series, you know exactly which series are are hot right now, and you know which creators are hot. It's not celebrities anymore. It's not people with 10 million followers anymore. It's literally like the college kid with 100,000 followers or maybe even like 10,000 followers sometimes. And those are the people that we've recruited."
"If you think what we've done to date is crazy then you're going to sh*t your pants when you see what happens for like the next month or 2 months"
"We're either crazy enough to make it, or we're crazy enough to d*e ......... Or too crazy and we d*e."
Highly recommend reading: Why Cluely Is The Dark Spirit of Venture Capital, Whether You Like It Or Not
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