Cluely, the Silicon Valley-based startup, just announced that it’s ARR has shot through the roof. In fact, it took them only one week after releasing their new enterprise product to get them to close $7 million! The company’s innovative offerings utilize artificial intelligence to analyze online conversations, deliver real-time notes, provide contextual insights, and suggest pertinent questions for users. Connect on Cluely Nikhil Arora Entrepreneur-in-Residence Cluely is quickly becoming an essential node in the tech ecosystem. This growth especially underscores its power in the burgeoning AI-enabled productivity tools space.
Cluely has been on sort of a revenue tear of late. This uptick follows signing up one public company that increased its annual contract with the nascent startup to $2.5 million. Producer Roy Lee celebrated this announcement with TechCrunch, pointing out how much the need for Cluely’s unique magic has grown. Prior to the recent release of the new enterprise version, Cluely had already crossed over the $3 million mark in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Their real-time notetaking feature exploded and became their killer differentiating feature.
Cluely’s products are designed to help people do more with less time. They present the opportunity to radically simplify workflows. The enterprise version of Cluely’s offering keeps the essential, wonderful features of the consumer product intact. It brings a host of robust features such as improved team management and security settings. Cluely’s real-time notetaker has been attracting interest as companies look for easy-to-use tools that can help them work smarter and boost productivity.
Cluely’s road has not been all smooth sailing. The company was created in the midst of that backlash. This came on the heels of Roy Lee’s recent viral thread on X, where he shared that Columbia University had suspended him for developing a tool that allowed users to cheat in software engineering job interviews. Aside from a rough launch, Cluely has attracted a ton of investment. Famous venture capital businesses such as Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, and Susa Ventures have faith in the emerging company’s mission.
Although there has been a lot of excitement around Cluely’s products, challengers are coming on the scene. A company named Pickle recently claimed on X to have developed Glass, an open-source product with functionality similar to Cluely’s. By noon on his first day, Glass had received over 850 stars! It was forked almost 150 times, a clear signal of booming interest from the developer community. Experts warn that Cluely’s standout features are potentially low-hanging fruit to copy.
In his experience, Roy Lee told us in an interview, meeting notes produced by AI have been particularly useful. He stated, “Meeting notes have been a proven very sticky, very interesting AI use case. The only problem with them is they’re all post-call.” This makes Cluely’s unique value clear—by focusing on real-time guidance rather than just post-mortem documentation.
Cluely is really finding their way in the shark tank. Like this Change reaction It has moved its brand advertising away from the high-octane “rage-bait” tack toward something closer to this: “Everything you Need.” This change indicates a concerted effort to reach a wider audience while still staying true to its roots.
