Cluely’s revenue has skyrocketed to about $7 million in ARR since it launched its new enterprise product a week ago, founder Roy Lee told TechCrunch. “Every single person who has a meeting or an interview is testing this out.”
Cluely, one of Silicon Valley’s most-talked-about startups, offers products that use AI to analyze online conversations, deliver real-time notes, provide context, and suggest questions to ask. This information appeared discreetly on the user’s screen, invisible to others.
For weeks leading up to the product reveal, Lee boasted that the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeded $3 million and that the startup was profitable.
The increase in interest is coming from consumers and businesses alike, he said.
Cluely is a startup born of controversy after Lee posted in a viral X thread saying he was suspended by Columbia University because he and a co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers.
He turned around and created a product and startup out of the tech, originally using the marketing tagline that it helps you “cheat on everything.” Now that it is backed by big-league VCs like Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, and Susa Ventures, it has toned down its marketing to “Everything You Need. Before You Ask. … This feels like cheating.”
It has turned into a Silicon Valley sensation from its rage-bait marketing.
But the startup’s controversial history hasn’t stopped businesses from showing interest in Cluely’s product, Lee insists, telling us that it has signed a public company that just this week doubled its annual contract with Cluely to $2.5 million. Lee declined to name the company.
The enterprise version of the product is similar to the consumer offering, but it comes with some extra features such as team management and additional security settings, Lee said. Business use cases include sales calls, customer support, and remote tutoring.
Which Cluely features are the most interesting to customers? According to Lee, it’s Cluely’s ability to take real-time notes.
“Meeting notes have been a proven very sticky, very interesting AI use case. The only problem with them is they’re all post-call,” Lee said of competitors’ products. “You want to look back at them in the middle of a meeting, and that is what we offer.”
However, Cluely’s real-time notetaker may be easy to replicate. On Thursday, Pickle, a company that describes itself as a digital clone factory, claimed on X that it built Glass, an open source, free product with very similar functionality to Cluely. By mid-day it had already garnered over 850 stars and been forked nearly 150 times — indicating that the open source developer community is giving this free version a try.
Time will tell if Cluely’s meteoric rise can withstand competition from free copycat products like Glass.