San Francisco-based startup, Cluely, which famously titled its brand as Cluely Secures $15M Series A from a16z: The AI Tool That Popularized “Cheating on Everything”, has managed to raise a not insignificant Series A round of 15 million dollars led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). It follows a seed investment of 5.3 million dollars sourced in recent months by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures. With the recent new, Cluely is valued at about 120 million dollars.
Launched in the first half of the year by 21-year-old Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam, Cluely enables one to cheat in real time during job interviews, exams, sales pitches and even person to person conversations. The desktop program based on AI follows the contents on a screen and audio and gives instant responses with a transparent UI that cannot be detected. The company can be linked to an earlier LLM called Interview Coder, Lee had created when he was at Columbia University, and had been suspended over.
Although controversially used, Cluely is profitable, stated Lee, since the time of its launch. The app has been used by tens of thousands of users since it was brought online. With the new funding, Cluely is poised to grow big: Cluely has now raised a $15 million round of funding, with investors that include an a16z partner, Bryan Kim who describes Lee as a visionary, who is fearless.
Lee will undertake an aggressive promotional campaign with goal of hitting 1 billion clips on the social sites. The team will recruit 50 so-called growth interns, who will produce daily content on Tik Tok and other platforms. The tongue-in-cheek promotional videos portraying Cluely on clumsy social interactions such as assuming to know something to seem good on a date are already included in the campaigns. These stunts appear in virals and although ethically dubious, they strengthen the edgy positioning on the brand.
Cluely uses the subscription model, at the rate of approximately 20 dollars a month. Being similar to an improved autocue, it provides context answers depending on the screen and audio data, rather than live Internet information. Cluely is manually launched by users and can present them with responses in the form of an overlay to the current workflow.
Cluely is a topic of ethics and privacy. The application has the ability to access sensitive information of users through their screen and mics. It says that it does not store or misuse the data but many are not sure that data would not be leaked or used by corporations. Cluely can also produce hallucinations sometimes it can be given a factually incorrect and irrelevant answer indicating that the present-day LLM has certain limitations.
Nevertheless, Cluely uses such cultural trends because of AI adoption. According to Lee, companies and applicants need, as the question depends on the use of AI in most aspects of learning and workplace environments, to embrace the leverage of AI tools to remain competitive. The rebuttal of critics to this argument includes the fact that AI can indeed neutralize the playing field, but out-of-control cheating can lower the value of credentials and corrode trusticity and scientific integrity, and the ethics of the profession.
In its operation, Cluely seeks to lower the latency, increase the accuracy of the responses and expand the data outside the screen content. Other planned features beyond future roadmap are deeper platform integrations, real-time support of voice, and latency lower than three seconds, currently regarded as a minimum requirement to be usable in live conversations.
Cluely finds itself at a cross point of innovation and ethics as it grows up. The company found an investor in the form of Andreessen Horowitz and a solid marketing plan capable of transforming the concept of augmentation with the help of AI in both personal and professional activities. But its future is linked to how fast it could tackle hallucinations and privacy, and whether Crypto authorities or institutions would be paying attention.
