Cluely, a bold new startup redefining how Gen Z approaches career discovery, has raised $5.3 million in funding to scale its mission: helping students and early professionals find not just jobs, but meaning in their work.

Founded by Chungin Lee and Neel Shanmugam, Cluely is building a platform that speaks to the way Gen Z actually navigates ambition - through authenticity, exploration, and storytelling, not static resumes and job boards.

The round was backed by Abstract and Susa Ventures, two firms with strong track records of backing founder-led startups at the earliest stages. With this capital, Cluely plans to grow its engineering team, expand outreach to universities, and further enhance its content-driven product experience.

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What Cluely Solves

Career discovery is broken for Gen Z. Traditional platforms are optimized for companies, not candidates - and they often reduce humans to keywords. But Gen Z isn’t looking for a job description that matches their major. They’re seeking purpose, relevance, and real stories from people they can relate to.

Cluely is flipping the equation by creating a new category: career storytelling as a product. The platform offers:

• Authentic career stories from peers and professionals who look and sound like them
  
• Short-form, immersive content that explores paths across roles, industries, and backgrounds
  
• Personalized discovery based on user interests, values, and aspirations
  
• Community-driven features that enable users to ask questions and build context
  
• Partnership tools for schools and employers to share credible journeys
  

Instead of treating careers like checklists, Cluely builds context around the decisions people actually make - why they chose one job over another, what surprised them, and what they’d do differently. That’s the kind of transparency Gen Z demands.

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Why This Matters Now

Gen Z is already the most diverse, digital-native, and values-driven workforce in history. But they’re also the most anxious and skeptical when it comes to careers:

• 73% of Gen Z say they want jobs that align with their personal values (Deloitte, 2023)
  
• More than half report feeling overwhelmed by the number of career choices and unsure how to evaluate them
  
• Traditional career sites rank among the least trusted sources of information for Gen Z job seekers (Handshake report, 2024)
  
• Mental health concerns and economic uncertainty have driven more students to seek meaningful work over lucrative offers
  

Cluely arrives at a pivotal moment - when the old playbook no longer fits, and the new one hasn’t been written. By focusing on real human journeys, not just job listings, they’re filling a massive gap between career education and career reality.

That clarity of purpose is what sets Cluely apart - but there’s something deeper here that every founder should pay attention to.

The best early-stage companies aren’t just building products. They’re shaping culture.

And Cluely is doing exactly that - by tuning in to the invisible frequency of Gen Z’s expectations before the rest of the market even notices the signal. They’re not guessing. They’re listening. They’ve internalized something most platforms ignore: Gen Z doesn’t want more content - they want context. They don’t need another algorithm - they need alignment with their values.

This is the founder playbook in action: Start with empathy. Build trust. Then scale. That’s the real compounding engine. Most startups sprint to MVPs and market fit - but skip the cultural insight that could've unlocked their moat. Cluely’s ultra-advantage? They didn’t build a product and go looking for users. They understood the user so deeply, the product almost built itself.

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Market Outlook: Career Discovery for Gen Z Is an Untapped Goldmine

The market Cluely is tapping into isn’t just emerging - it’s exploding.

Over 74% of Gen Z say they feel unprepared for the job market despite having access to more digital tools than any generation before them (Monster Gen Z Hiring Report, 2024). Traditional career platforms have failed to resonate, prioritizing listings over learning and leaving a massive experience gap for users navigating their first major decisions.

The global career education and coaching market is projected to reach $25.4 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 8.7%, according to Allied Market Research. And Gen Z, now making up 30% of the global workforce, is demanding experiences that are video-first, authenticity-driven, and personalized - not templated.

Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube and TikTok have quietly become primary career research tools for over 60% of teens, indicating that the next-generation of workforce platforms won’t look like job boards - they’ll look like Cluely.

In this context, Cluely isn’t just riding a wave - it’s surfing a generational inflection. They’re building the infrastructure Gen Z already believes should exist: bite-sized, visual, community-powered paths to purpose-driven careers. And as schools, employers, and governments struggle to fill the gap, Cluely may be the bridge they all end up crossing.

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What’s Next for Cluely?

With fresh capital in hand, Cluely is preparing to go from stealth to scale. The roadmap includes:

• Launching at scale across major U.S. universities and student networks
  
• Expanding creator partnerships to source real stories from diverse professionals
  
• Building monetization layers for premium content and school/employer partnerships
  
• Growing the product team to ship personalization and social discovery features
  
• Doubling down on trust signals, including moderation, DEI safeguards, and community input
  

Chungin Lee and Neel Shanmugam aren’t just chasing growth - they’re building a platform that could define how an entire generation finds its way. And in doing so, they’re not only capturing a market - they’re creating a movement.

Cluely isn’t just another career app. It’s the first one built for the generation that won’t settle.