Cluely is an AI desktop assistant that runs as a translucent, always-on overlay. It reads the active screen, listens to system and microphone audio, and pushes contextual answers, scripts, and citations into the user's field of view without ever appearing in shared screen recordings or video-call participant feeds. The product is most often described as a real-time co-pilot for any conversation or task.
The company was founded in early 2025 by Chungin 'Roy' Lee and Neel Shanmugam, two Columbia University students who were suspended for building Interview Coder, an undetectable LeetCode assistant. They were joined by CTO Alex Chen, the only co-founder who actually graduated from Columbia. Lee leads as CEO and is the public face of the brand, known for provocative TikTok and X campaigns that drove the company's initial viral growth.
Cluely's funding history is unusually compressed. It raised a $5.3M seed in April 2025 co-led by Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures, and only two months later closed a $15M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz with continued participation from existing investors. Reporters covering the round have put post-money valuation around $120M, making Cluely one of the fastest-scaled a16z bets of the cycle. The company is headquartered in New York City.
The product is sold via a consumer subscription with Pro tiers around $20 per month plus enterprise pricing for sales and support teams. Customers download a native macOS or Windows app, grant accessibility and screen-recording permissions, and the overlay then routes captured context to a hosted LLM. Cluely positions itself against horizontal AI meeting tools like Otter and Fireflies and against vertical sales copilots like Gong, but differentiates on its always-on screen-and-audio listening rather than after-the-fact transcription.
The controversial origin story is core to Cluely's distribution strategy. By framing the product as something that 'cheats on everything', the team has earned hundreds of millions of organic impressions on X and TikTok and converted that attention into both signups and waitlist demand. Critics, including reporters at Inc. and the SF Standard, have questioned whether revenue claims match the marketing.
The key differentiator is the invisible-overlay form factor combined with simultaneous screen + microphone context. Most AI assistants are either chat windows or post-call summarizers; Cluely is closer to a heads-up display, which is what enables novel use cases in sales calls, support, technical interviews, and live customer demos.