Chungin Lee: Are you aware why this 21-year-old Silicon Valley CEO was suspended by Columbia College?

Within the fast-evolving world of AI and employability, few tales are as polarising or instructive as that of Chungin “Roy” Lee. Simply over a 12 months in the past, the 21-year-old pc science pupil at Columbia College was suspended for constructing an AI software deemed incompatible with tutorial integrity. Immediately, he’s the co-founder and CEO of Cluely, a Silicon Valley startup that has raised $20.3 million in funding and sits on the centre of the continued debate round AI-enabled productiveness and moral boundaries.Cluely is a stealth-mode AI assistant that provides real-time, undetectable help throughout digital environments together with interviews, exams, conferences and extra. The query it raises is important: is that this actual innovation or engineered dishonesty?

The product that began all of it

In early 2024, whereas nonetheless at Columbia, Lee launched Interview Coder, an AI software designed to help candidates in real-time coding interviews. It learn display exercise, picked up audio, and provided strategies, all discreetly. The intention, in accordance with Lee, was to assist customers navigate high-pressure interview codecs that had didn’t evolve within the age of generative AI.The product gained traction shortly, with over 10,000 customers and almost $47,000 in income inside months. Lee even used his personal software to crack interviews at tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and TikTok, till he publicly demonstrated its use, prompting firms to rescind affords and Columbia to analyze.

From tutorial setback to entrepreneurial pivot

In April 2024, Columbia suspended Lee for a 12 months for violating its Tutorial Integrity Coverage. The disciplinary motion may need ended one other pupil’s ambitions, however for Lee, it marked a turning level. He moved to San Francisco, teamed up with fellow pupil Neel Shanmugam, and rebranded his software as Cluely.In contrast to its predecessor, Cluely was designed for broader use. It now helps not simply job interviews however exams, conferences, gross sales pitches, and extra, providing real-time, undetectable AI help throughout digital interactions. The pivot marked Lee’s formal transition from a pupil innovator to a full-time founder working in one in every of tech’s most scrutinised moral gray zones.

Traders again the imaginative and prescient

By April 2025, Cluely had raised $5.3 million in seed funding. Simply two months later, Andreessen Horowitz led a $15 million Sequence A spherical, signalling high-profile validation of Lee’s imaginative and prescient. For Lee, the funding rounds weren’t simply monetary milestones; they have been affirmations of an concept that many nonetheless discovered troublesome to digest.Lee has remained unapologetic about his strategy. “Everybody makes use of AI now,” he instructed the Related Press. “It would not make sense to have methods that take a look at individuals as if they do not.” For him, Cluely is much less about dishonest and extra about bridging the hole between outdated evaluations and real-world workflows.

The profession dilemma Lee now embodies

Lee’s trajectory raises elementary questions on the way forward for work and qualification. As AI turns into inseparable from day by day productiveness, the place can we draw the road between help and unfair benefit? Employers, together with tech giants like Google, are reportedly rethinking their hiring practices. Training methods are scrambling to revisit honour codes that now appear out of sync with how college students study and work.Lee’s profession graph is marked by sharp pivots: from pupil to founder, from suspension to seed-stage CEO, from controversy to capital. Every choice has positioned him on the intersection of innovation and disruption, and he’s leaning into the strain.Whether or not Cluely emerges as a brand new commonplace for AI-native instruments or will get regulated out of mainstream use, Lee’s story affords an early case research in what it means to construct a profession in an period the place conventional guidelines are being rewritten by know-how.TOI Training is on WhatsApp now. Observe us right here.