By Bai Jiao

A 21-year-old developer created a cheating AI tool, got suspended from Columbia University—but secured $5.3 million in funding!

The young founder (we’ll call him Xiao Li) recently announced the good news: just days earlier, they had quietly secured seed funding from prominent firms Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures.

So what exactly do they do? They offer an AI tool capable of deceiving any system.

Take their demo, for example:

Xiao Li uses an AI assistant during a date to help him converse with a woman, with the AI instantly providing tailored responses.

Netizens commented: “Feels straight out of *Black Mirror*.”

Naturally, this development philosophy sparked immediate controversy: “Have you considered the downstream consequences?”

Shortly after launching the tool, Columbia University officially disciplined them. Now, the founders have left the university to focus full-time on their startup.

Columbia Students Build a Tool for "Cheating at Everything"

The tool was initially called Interview Coder. It provides users with a covert browser window—hidden from interviewers or examiners—to cheat during coding interviews, sales calls, and technical assessments.

Earlier this month, the AI tool’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) surpassed $3 million.

The tool was originally designed for developers to cheat on LeetCode. One Chinese developer even claimed he landed an internship at Amazon using it. He posted a video that quickly went viral—until Amazon issued a copyright takedown notice.

According to his account, he eventually received job offers from Amazon, Meta, TikTok, and Capital One.

Over the past two years, Xiao Li spent 600 hours practicing and ranked within the top 2% of global LeetCode competitors.

He once criticized LeetCode interview questions as essentially “useless, poorly standardized, irrelevant, and a waste of most developers’ time.”

It was precisely this pain point that inspired him to build the cheating tool.

The company is currently co-founded by Chungin Lee and his classmate Neel Shanmugam.

Lee serves as CEO, while Neel Shanmugam is Cluely’s Chief Operating Officer.

Prior to this, they faced disciplinary action from the university, undergoing weeks of interviews and interventions. Eventually, Xiao Li was suspended for one year.

In the end, they chose to drop out.

Amusingly, Xiao Li wrote on LinkedIn that he was expelled from Columbia “because I’m too handsome and popular.”

You’ve got to admire the youth!

One More Thing

This isn’t the only controversial startup making waves.

Mechanize, whose founder Tamay Besiroglu previously worked on the Epoch AI project and served as a full-time research scientist at MIT, claims the company’s mission is to “achieve complete automation of all work” and “full automation of the economy.”

Does this mean they’re actively building AI agents to replace every human worker? Ironically, they’re still hiring people.

Unsurprisingly, this drew skepticism from online communities.

What do you think about these controversial startups?