Lightly is a Zurich, Switzerland-based tech startup founded in 2020 by Matthias Heller and Igor Susmelj. The company offers a data curation tool and platform that helps machine learning teams save time and money on data selection and labelling while improving model performance. Its platform is used by Fortune 500 companies and startups in autonomous driving, robotics, and video analytics. Lightly graduated from Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company intends to use new funds to increase headcount and expand to the US. It raised $3M in Seed funding led by Wingman Ventures. Lightly, a spinoff from ETH Zurich and the University of St Gallen, builds an open-source enabled data platform that uses self-learning algorithms to tell data teams which 1% of their data is most valuable. The platform claims it can improve models by ~20% while saving up to 90% of labeling costs. Since going live at the end of 2020, Lightly has attracted over 400 cloud users and customers that include Fortune 500 companies and startups in autonomous driving, robotics, and video analytics, with customers mainly originating from the US. Its open-source framework has been adopted by industry experts and research labs and accumulated over 1,000 stars on GitHub. Revenues are described as accelerating fast, currently growing at 20% monthly. For next steps, the company plans to close a seed round and continue improving its core product.

Total raised

$3M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

May 2022