21-year-old Ivy League dropouts raise millions, launch Bay Area AI startup to 'cheat on everything’

SAN FRANCISCO - Two 21-year-old Columbia University drop-outs have set up shop in San Francisco to launch a highly controversial tech-startup, with a stated slogan to use its artificial intelligence application to "cheat on everything."

The company is called Cluely. At the end of April, its founders, Chungin Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam, moved across the country from New York to open their new headquarters in a three-story live-work loft in the city’s Mission District, just south of the SoMa neighborhood.

What they’ve developed in Cluely is a desktop application that aims to use AI to "redefine how the world works" and redefine what it means to cheat. 

How it works

Lee, the company's CEO, said people are using Cluely to get instantaneous information and ultimately the upper hand in areas like job interviews, sales calls, and work meetings.

He compared his program to the AI character J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Marvel blockbuster series Iron Man.

What they're saying:

"We're building Jarvis, but he lives in your computer," Lee explained to KTVU. "Phrased a more specific way, it's an app that sees everything you do, hears everything you do on your computer, and predicts rather than responds to what information you need at the time."

He noted that for traditional chatbots, users need to ask the program its question, but with Cluely, AI is used at the next level. By just pressing cmd and enter, the program interprets what information users need, almost like an extension of their own brain.  

Cluely is an all-encompassing presence. It exists over every other app on your screen, scours the screen, and uses information from the device’s microphone to figure out what the user needs to know.  

"It will then feed the answer to you, while being invisible to screen share the entire time," Lee explained.

And it all happens in real time, with the ultimate goal, Cluely founders said, to provide users with knowledge and information before they even know they need it. 

"We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again," the company said in its manifesto.

Lee is careful with the nuance of Cluely being considered as a straight-up cheating tool. 

"It's much more akin to a desktop assistant, than it is like an actual cheat on everything tool. But just the phrasing and the phraseology of it makes it controversial and makes people talk about it," he explained.

Launch video 

On April 20, Lee posted a widely circulated video, starring himself, to demonstrate how the app works. In the video, he plays a young man on a first date, as he uses Cluely to try and impress (and lie to) his date.

His character, who is wearing glasses to access the app, retrieves information in real time as he tries to fake his age, his resume, and align his interests to his date’s, to win her over.

Even after she calls him on a lie, he’s able to recover with even more information that Cluely feeds him.

No surprise, the controversial video received a lot of looks and backlash, including many who questioned the ethics and morality of the product.

On X, another young AI platform creator, Palash Shah, praised Cluely's founders for their innovative work, calling them "generational founders, though he asked, "Aren’t you concerned what the downstream affects of mass cheating are? for example, if all of our doctors cheated their way through school, would you still trust them to operate?" 

Shah went on to comment, "this feels like creating a problem expecting that it'll force a solution -- without considering the externalities."

Lee in turn, responded, "this is what effective accelerationism looks like." 

Mission to change views on cheating 

Ultimately, the company said it wants to redefine what cheating is.

"What our goal with this is to desensitize everyone to the phrase ‘cheating.’ If we say, ‘Cheat on anything at every possible turn,’" Lee said, "then the next time someone looks at you and says, ‘You're using AI to cheat, it sort of becomes a nothing. But like, so what? What are you talking about? Cheat begins to lose its meaning."

Lee challenged folks to think about his product in the context of important technological advances in history which all faced a level of resistance. 

"If you look at any technology in the past that has significantly improved the capabilities of humans, whether that's calculators and Google search, they were all met with an initial push back of, ‘hey, this is cheating,’ and a significant group of people who are moralizing against it," he said.

He then suggested imagining a world in which half of the population embraced the use of calculators and the other half rejected it.

"You end up with half of America who have never experienced the benefits of fast calculation. As a result, never experienced any of the innovation. And just imagine the difference in economic output. Difference in education, difference in entire quality of life between the half of America that embraced calculators and the half of America that didn't," he said. 

As a student, Lee said he was among a proportion of his peers that had deeply integrated AI into his life, using it to its fullest capabilities. 

"This proportion of students, this very small portion of college students, are at a so much higher leverage than every other student. They have almost infinite time, and they realize the potential that AI has today," he said.

And that leverage, Lee said, has led to him and his co-founder being able to raise more than $5 million in seed funding to build their company. 

"This proportion of students is only going to grow and grow, and they will just completely dominate the proportion of the students who are not using AI," Lee said. "And if you project that out over 10 years, then it's not students that we have to worry about. It's 30 to 40 year olds, the most economically productive class in America." 

His perspective is that, essentially, people will either get on the AI train and those who don't will be left behind. 

"Half of them will be completely stranded with nothing to do and zero way of improving the economy because their entire job has been automated by AI. And the other half will be people who have done the automations, and they'll be infinitely more wealthy," Lee said. 

‘Wealth inequality’

And that divide, he said, could lead to unprecedented economic inequality.

"Unless we solve it and universalize the tech, this will be wealth inequality like we've never ever seen before," he said.

Over the next five years, Lee predicts that the impact of artificial intelligence will be exponential, essentially changing how the world operates.

"AI is literally the single most powerful technology that we've ever seen in the history of humanity," Lee said.

Being controversial 

The Cluely co-founder proclaims that his company is one of the most talked-about and controversial tech startups.

Its bold marketing approach to delivering their message has been at the center of that. 

"So pretty much everything we do is rooted in the idea that you should, no matter what it takes, go viral," Lee said. "Because again, our mission is to get the word, ‘cheat on everything’ out there… And you don't get there by being some saint and just not doing anything that have the attention of the masses. If you want to get the attention of everybody, you need to have a strong rallying talking point."

The backstory:

Lee and Shanmugam’s audacious and attention-drawing arrival to the tech start-up world happened quickly.

To date, the company has raised $5.3 million, officially launching on April 20. 

The founders’ accelerated journey here began earlier this year in February, after Lee used an AI tool they developed, called Interview Coder, to essentially outsmart Amazon's interview system to land an internship with the tech giant.

"I recorded the entire Amazon process using the tool, from OA [online assessment] to offer. I posted the video and it was doing moderately well," Lee shared on X back in March. 

According to Lee, Amazon saw his posts, notified Columbia, and the university proceeded to take disciplinary action.

Amazon disputes that assertion.

The company told KTVU that it hasn’t found any evidence that Amazon reported him to Columbia.

Lee himself described the process as premeditated and "an intentionally planned marketing stunt."

And Columbia did take notice and reacted. 

"I was put on probation first and academic probation because they had ruled it as a violation of academic integrity," Lee told KTVU. "And that hurt me because it was very clearly not, in my opinion, a violation of academic equity. As a result, I took things many steps further and that ended up with me getting a suspension for one year, which ends May of 2026," he added.

But instead of waiting out his time for the suspension to expire, Lee said the experience fast-tracked a plan he had already intended on implementing – leaving school to build out his company. 

"I was planning on doing it very long ago, but they sort of were the first, in my opinion, to poke the bear, so to speak," Lee said.

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Critical of the higher education model 

He and Shanmugam are outspokenly critical of the pay-off of higher education.

Shanmugam, who grew up in Dallas, said his path at Columbia was "more traditional" than his co-founder’s. Shanmugam left the New York Ivy League after two and a half years there.  

"I think I can say pretty confidently, I didn't learn a single thing in a class at Columbia," the Cluely COO said, "which is like, pretty crazy. And I think that applies to most of my friends."

He said that what he found was that most students were cramming for exams or even cheating for a test and ultimately failing to retain the information. He believes that the current system lends itself to making college a very performative exercise in many ways.

"In a fundamental way, nobody's getting anything from that. It's just like a formative act. So I feel like when we say cheating, we say, we're not really doing something that's new," Shanmugam said.

Both he and Lee feel that time being used for rote memorization could be better spent elsewhere, towards making a bigger impact.

"That's time you're taking away from building something cool or doing something that's solving problems," Shanmugam said. "I think giving people Cluely and giving people AI can solve harder things to do more meaningful work."

For Lee, he said Columbia’s reaction to the program they developed and then tested, with the Amazon interview process, further questioned the purpose of why he was in college. 

"You guys are supposed to be an Ivy League school that champions the future generation of leaders, yet, this is how you respond to a student using AI that in no way violates anything in the student handbook?" he charged.

Lee asserts that he and Shanmugam were careful to use their program in a way to ensure they weren’t breaking any university rules.

"Before we even built the tool, we did a very deep dive through the student handbook to make sure that we didn't violate any academic integrity policies," he said. "And I mean, like technical interviews... It's not under the jurisdiction of Columbia. So I'm just very surprised that they reacted to it."

KTVU reached out to Columbia University for a statement, but a spokesperson declined to comment, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privact Act, or FERPA, a federal law designed to protect the privacy of student education records.  

Amazon did respond by providing background on its recruiting process, saying the company invites candidates to share their experience using AI that may be relevant to the position that they’re seeking. Also when relevant, the company said that candidates are required to acknowledge that they won’t use unauthorized tools like AI during the interview or assessment process.

Ethics and concerns

Among the many deeply concerning issues with AI beyond the "cheating" aspect, are concerns over privacy and security.

San Jose State University tech expert and engineering Professor Ahmed Banafa said that there should be alarms raised when considering this extensive ability to gather information. 

"It's like your invisible friend that's going to be with you, and you trust that friend because that friend will never turn against you because he or she knows everything about you. So that's a key thing when it comes to gathering information. There are some ethical issues here," Banafa said. "Number one is, who owns the data that this AI is collecting? And who has control over the data? Can this company sell this data to other companies, third parties?" Banafa asked. 

The other concern is security.

"What happens if somebody accessed their servers and starts gathering all this information?" Banafa asked. "This data is a very precise data because you can describe the behavior of that person."

And with deep fake technology, the idea of stealing information becomes an even greater threat. 

"If everything is digital, then cyber criminals, they will have access to this data, if it's not protected in the right way. And then they will have access to more information, so we'll have sophisticated attacks."

Other concerns involve how far we go as a society to use AI to replace the muscles to think for ourselves.

In Cluely’s manifesto, it asks, "Why memorize facts, write code, research anything — when a model can do it in seconds?"

Lee's response is that humans are constantly evolving, losing one muscle to exercise another. 

"We've already lost countless human muscles since the industrial revolution," he said "We've probably lost the muscle of moving your arms a particular way, like blacksmithing a tool. We've lost that muscle. I don't think anybody complains about losing those particular muscles," he said.

When it comes to technology and how people now communicate, he acknowledged that there may be some regret in that arena, but the ability to adapt continues. 

"Perhaps a socializing muscle, but I mean, like humans adapt, there's new ways that we socialize now. And we socialized online. And then we socialize in school and there are different environments, and humans always adapt and overcome," he said.

Coming to the Bay Area 

Lee’s transplantation to the Bay Area is not his first. And it’s clear the innovative technological edge the region offers is what has drawn him here. 

He grew up in Atlanta, and before going to Colombia, he attended Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. 

His time at the community college was a reroute from his initial plan to attend Harvard University, where he was accepted to during his senior year of high school.

Lee said Harvard rescinded its offer due to disciplinary action after he snuck out during a high school field trip and then got caught by a police officer. He recounted the event on X, explaining that he tried to outrun the officer, which he acknowledged was a "dumb move." 

So instead of Harvard, he ended up enrolling at Diablo Valley College with plans on transferring to UC Berkeley. 

Local perspective:

He said that during his time at DVC he learned a lot, including discovering what he called "a very surprising untapped density of extremely high IQ people at community college."

On X, he also shared observations about some of the most underserved populations in the region. 

"I TA'ed a community college class in Oakland that was >50% homeless people," he posted. "You have no idea how unfortunate their circumstances are. If I was raised in their shoes, I would be homeless too. I am extremely blessed."

When it was time to transfer, he did not go to UC Berkeley, but accepted an offer from Columbia.

And now he’s back in the Bay Area, the obvious place, he believes, for the revolution he and Shanmugam are trying to mobilize.

"This is the core of technology. When you are trying to do something as bold as us and swing as big as we are, I think you need every single card that you can possibly have. And historically, statistically, there's a higher chance of a startup succeeding based in San Francisco than anywhere else. So I think it would be foolish of us not to be based in San Francisco," he said. "Just being surrounded by other tech entrepreneurs and people who are also swinging big, it's very perspective shifting."

Company's fast growth

In less than two months, Cluely has grown to 11 full-time employees, taken on interns and received 10 million views on social media.

Lee said in a year, the company’s financial goal is to surpass a hundred million dollars in recurring annual revenue. 

Its annual recurring revenue is closing in on $4 million, according to Lee.  

"So this puts us on the correct timeline to be fastest to 100 mil in history," the young CEO said.

And as for Cluely's role in society, the company wants its app to be on every single person’s computer within a year, and then on every person’s phone. 

"Eventually five years down the line, perhaps everyone's glasses," he projected. 

Chip inside people's brains?

What Cluely wants further into the future is the stuff made of sci-fi movies and books.

"10, 20 years down the line as a chip inside everyone's brain, helping them use AI to think at the level of thought. That's what I see the end game as Cluely as. It's a true augmentation of humans," Lee projected.

Banafa said this idea clearly makes those concerns about privacy and security an even greater threat.

"Now, if they have something in my brain in that chip, can somebody access that? Of course, because they have to access it, they can send information and receive information. Somebody can hack it. Now, the term brainwash will really be a brainwash," the professor said. "They can just go and brainwash everybody by one press. They press that button and all the information is gone, new information is downloaded. It's really scary."

Banafa called for stricter rules and regulations.

"If there are no guide rails, if there are no rules, then it's going to be really the Wild West, and the result is not going to be something people are going to be happy with," the tech expert said. 

While he emphasized that we need to make protecting our data a priority, he does agree that AI, as a technology, is a significant, positive advancement to accelerate productivity, allowing people to do more with their time.

"I agree with that," the professor said. "This is the direction of AI from the beginning."

Human and the machine

Lee challenged people to reconfigure the way they approach artifical intelligence.

"I think everyone is worried about AI because we worry about what happens when it's humans versus the machine. But I don't think anybody truly envisions a world where it's human and the machine, where we sort of integrate into one. And the machine just serves to augment us as every machine has in the past, just at a deeper biological level," Lee said. "And I'm very optimistic about that future, and that's a future that I hope to help with Cluely."

And even with the human-like capabilities of AI, Lee believes the technology will never replace what makes us human.

"What makes us human is our particular tastes and our opinions and the ability to determine, 'here's what I want to see in the world,' not the actual ability to manifest, making that into the world. It's our humor, and it's our livelihood, and it's everything that we like, dislike," Lee said. These opinions and preferences are not something that an AI can tell you. It's just something that you develop over a lifetime of experiences." 

He said AI just gives humans infinite leverage for quick decisions toward making ideas become reality and deciding what they want to see in the world. 

"But the person that decides, ‘I want to see this exist in the world,’ will never be an AI," the Cluely CEO said. "That will always be human. And I think that's the most human part of us."