Cluely’s jaw-dropping jump from $3M to $7M ARR in just seven days has competitors reaching for the panic button. The AI meeting assistant‘s real-time note-taking features struck gold with enterprise clients, including a massive $2.5M deal that literally doubled overnight. Meanwhile, rival Pickle fired back with “Glass,” an open-source alternative that’s already racked up 850+ GitHub stars. The race is officially on, and the stakes keep climbing higher for everyone involved.
The AI-powered meeting assistant watched its ARR explode from $3M to $7M in seven days after launching enterprise features. That’s the kind of growth that makes VCs dust off their calculators and competitors quietly panic.
Roy Lee, Cluely’s founder, confirmed the surge came from their new enterprise-focused capabilities – think team management and advanced security features that big companies actually want to pay for. The timing couldn’t have been better, considering they were already profitable before this rocket ship took off.
Nothing beats launching premium features when you’re already in the black – pure profit acceleration without the usual startup burn anxiety.
The secret sauce? Real-time meeting notes and suggested questions** that appear invisibly during calls. While competitors are still figuring out post-meeting summaries**, Cluely’s betting on immediacy and contextual relevance. Smart move, considering how quickly attention spans evaporate in back-to-back Zoom marathons.
Their enterprise pivot is paying dividends. One public company signed a $2.5M contract and promptly doubled it after the launch. Another enterprise customer locked in a $500K annual deal. Sales teams, customer support, and remote education sectors are all taking notice. High user engagement has been particularly notable due to the platform’s real-time capabilities.
But here’s where things get spicy – the competition isn’t rolling over. Pickle launched “Glass,” an open-source alternative offering similar functionality for free. The GitHub community responded with 850+ stars and nearly 150 forks faster than you can say “market disruption.”
This puts Cluely in a precarious position. Their proprietary features now face replication risk from developers who work for pizza and passion projects. The company’s early controversial branding – remember the “cheat on everything” messaging that got Lee suspended from Columbia? – has been scrubbed for mainstream “productivity and compliance” positioning. The messaging evolution reflects their pivot to Everything You Need Before You Ask as their new brand promise.
Andreessen Horowitz, Abstract Ventures, and Susa Ventures are backing Cluely’s play, providing the financial runway to stay ahead of copycats. This funding gives Cluely room to further develop personalization capabilities that adapt to individual customer preferences and histories.
But in a market where real-time notetaking features might be easier to replicate than originally thought, the question becomes: can they innovate fast enough to justify premium pricing?
The AI productivity tools space just got a lot more interesting – and crowded.
