Roy Lee (entrepreneur)
Chungin "Roy" Lee | |
|---|---|
Lee in 2025 | |
| Born | Chungin Lee 2003 (age 22–23) |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Known for | Co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence company Cluely Founder of Interview Coder |
Chungin "Roy" Lee is an American entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and CEO of Cluely, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.[1] Lee also founded Interview Coder, an AI Software that provides assistance in coding interviews.[2][3]
Early life
Lee is of Korean-American ancestry and grew up in Atlanta. He attended Diablo Valley College and then briefly studied Columbia University before facing suspension and dropping out.[4]
Career
While studying at Columbia University, Lee and cofounder Neel Shanmugam built Interview Coder, an artificial intelligence tool that "acts as a teleprompter, using your screen and audio to provide real-time analysis, questions, and notes."[5][4]
Lee and Shanmugam later rebranded Interview Coder to Cluely in April 2025. The company raised $5.3 million in its initial seed round and later garnered $15 million from a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz by June.[5][6][7][8]
Immediately after its launch, Cluely gained lots of traction through social media marketing, specifically with the tagline that it could "help you cheat on anything."[9] According to The San Francisco Standard, the company pays for over 60 content creators and 700 video editors.[5] At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Lee stated that "Engineers just cannot make good content" and that Cluely's "distribution" strategy through viral content was a big driver of its growth.[10]
Controversies
College
In his senior year of high school, Lee was accepted to Harvard University, but his offer was rescinded after getting caught sneaking out on a field trip in high school by a police officer. Afterward, he enrolled at Diablo Valley College, with plans to transfer to University of California, Berkeley.[4]
In early 2025, Lee revealed on LinkedIn that he successfully used Interview Coder during an interview for a software engineer position at Amazon, after which Amazon rescinded his job offer.[11][12] Columbia University placed him on academic probation due to "a violation of academic integrity," after which he was suspended for one year, due to end in May 2026. Rather than wait, Lee dropped out of college to work on Cluely.[4]
Cluely
Upon launching Cluely and marketing it with the "provocative language" of cheating, several startups pushed back and developed tools that could spot cheating, such as Validia's Truely software. Lee defended his marketing strategy by arguing that any kind of viral attention was crucial to product distribution.[13] By June 2025, however, all references to cheating on job interviews were removed from Cluely's website.[14]
In March 2026, Lee acknowledged that he had previously misrepresented Cluely’s annual recurring revenue in a 2025 interview with TechCrunch[15]. He stated on social media that the $7 million figure he had provided was inaccurate and issued a public retraction[16]. Reporting by TechCrunch noted that the interview had been arranged through the company’s public relations representative rather than being an unsolicited inquiry.[15]
Personal life
Lee is of Korean descent.[12]
References
- ^ Ming, Lee Chong. "Viral AI 'cheating' startup Cluely is offering engineers up to $1M and $350K for designers: 'Please be world-class'". Business Insider. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Elias, Jennifer (2025-03-09). "Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews". CNBC. Retrieved 2026-03-02.
- ^ "How this 21-year-old is helping techies 'crack' online job interviews". The Times of India. 2025-03-11. ISSN 0971-8257. Retrieved 2026-03-02.
- ^ a b c d Song, Sharon (2025-06-10). "21-year-old Ivy League dropouts raise millions, launch Bay Area AI startup to 'cheat on everything'". KTVU FOX 2. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ a b c "Inside the frat-bro startup that wants you to 'cheat on everything'". sfstandard.com. 2025-07-18. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ "It's not 'ragebaiting,' it's probably just my personality, says Cluely CEO Roy Lee". KRON4. 2025-10-30. Archived from the original on 2025-11-05. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Temkin, Marina (2025-11-05). "Cluely's Roy Lee hints that viral hype is not enough". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Kim, Bryan; Zhou, Eric (June 20, 2025). "Investing in Cluely". Andreessen Horowitz. Archived from the original on June 20, 2025. Retrieved March 9, 2026.
- ^ Team, The Tech Buzz. "Cluely's Roy Lee preaches controversial ragebait marketing". www.techbuzz.ai. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Ming, Lee Chong. "The cofounder of the AI 'cheating' app Cluely says engineers can't make viral content and that's why their startups flop". Business Insider. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Temkin, Marina (2025-07-10). "Why Cluely's Roy Lee isn't sweating cheating detectors". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ a b Daily, The Chosun (2025-07-17). "The Columbia dropout who outsmarted Big Tech". The Chosun Daily. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Levinson, Ava (2025-11-02). "The 'Cheating App' Founder Explains How to Rage Bait Your Startup to Success". Inc. Archived from the original on 2025-11-05. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ Ming, Lee Chong. "The cofounder of the viral AI 'cheating' startup Cluely says he only hires people for 2 jobs". Business Insider. Retrieved 2026-02-20.
- ^ a b Bort, Julie (March 5, 2026). "Cluely CEO Roy Lee admits to publicly lying about revenue numbers last year".
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Lee, Roy [@im_roy_lee] (March 5, 2026). "eh kinda, here's our stripes from june 2025 …". Twitter.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)