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With AI, Everyone is a Dev. EveryDev.ai ©
    1. Home
    2. Developers
    3. Lightly

    Lightly

    Lightly is a data-centric AI company building technology that helps AI learn from the right data faster, safer, and with less waste. Its platform helps ML teams curate, label, evaluate, manage, and train computer-vision and multimodal datasets and models.

    Visit Website

    At a Glance

    1Tool Listed
    6Products
    12Capabilities
    Discussions
    Bahnhofstrasse 86Headquarters
    2019Est.
    $10MRaised
    Focus Areas
    Image
    AI Development Libraries
    Model Management
    Connect
    Latest News
    LightlyTrain 0.16.0 added LTDETRv2 and Depth Anything inference support.Jun 29, 2026
    LightlySSL announced LeJEPA support for self-supervised learning.May 28, 2026
    Markets
    • ML engineers and data teams
    • Autonomous-vehicle and automotive companies
    • Robotics companies
    • Computer-vision researchers
    • +4 more

    AI Tools by Lightly

    (1)
    View LightlySSL
    LightlySSL tool icon

    LightlySSL

    Self Supervised Vision Library

    AI Dev LibrariesModel ManagementImage

    Discussions

    No discussions yet

    Be the first to start a discussion about Lightly

    Latest News

    06/29/2026

    LightlyTrain 0.16.0 added LTDETRv2 and Depth Anything inference support.

    lightly.ai
    05/28/2026

    LightlySSL announced LeJEPA support for self-supervised learning.

    github.com
    05/14/2026

    LightlyTrain 0.15.0 added Distillationv3 and EUPE backbone support.

    lightly.ai
    02/23/2026

    EpicKitchens-100 became available in LightlyStudio with searchable video embeddings.

    lightly.ai

    Products & Services

    6
    LightlyStudio
    October 21, 2025

    Integrated, open-source-at-its-core multimodal/computer-vision data platform for curation, annotation, QA, evaluation, collaboration, dataset versioning, embeddings, and export, with GUI, Python SDK, and API.

    LightlyTrain
    April 15, 2025

    Computer-vision training toolkit covering self-supervised pretraining, pseudo-labeling/autolabeling, distillation, and fine-tuning for detection, segmentation, and classification models, including DINOv2/v3 workflows.

    LightlySSL
    2019

    Open-source PyTorch-based self-supervised learning framework for training vision models without labels; supports modular losses and heads, custom backbones, distributed training, and many SSL methods.

    LightlyServices
    2025

    Expert AI training-data services for LLMs, AI agents, computer vision, multimodal models, RL environments, RLHF, model evaluation, synthetic data, and prompt generation.

    Market Position

    Lightly positions itself as an integrated, data-centric computer-vision and multimodal ML platform spanning raw-data curation, labeling/QA, evaluation, and model training rather than a single-purpose annotation or dataset tool. Its differentiators are automated embeddings and selection, an open-source/developer-friendly foundation, Python/API access, and a combined LightlyStudio plus LightlyTrain workflow. Its own comparison/resources pages identify Voxel51/FiftyOne, CVAT, Label Studio, Ultralytics, Encord, Labelbox, Roboflow, and V7 Darwin as alternatives or comparison targets.

    Leadership

    Founders

    MH

    Matthias Heller

    Co-founder and CEO responsible for strategy and growth. He holds a BA from the University of St. Gallen and an MSc in Strategic Management from HEC Paris; public profiles also describe prior work at BCG, startups, and in finance.

    IS

    Igor Susmelj

    Co-founder and CTO responsible for technical development. He holds BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich and has published academic work focused on deep learning; Lightly was founded from ETH Zurich research.

    Executive Team

    MH

    Matthias Heller

    Co-Founder & CEO

    Leads strategy and growth; BA, University of St. Gallen, and MSc in Strategic Management, HEC Paris.

    IS

    Igor Susmelj

    Co-Founder & CTO

    Leads technical development; BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, with deep-learning research publications.

    Founding Story

    Lightly was founded from ETH Zurich research by engineers and researchers who believed that model quality starts with better data. The initial vision was to use self-learning and data-selection methods to identify the most valuable examples in large, mostly unlabeled datasets, reducing unnecessary labeling and making machine learning more efficient.

    Business Model

    Revenue Model

    Lightly offers free/open-source entry points and monetizes commercial products and services through paid enterprise/commercial licenses, hosted platform access, demos/sales, and custom AI training-data services. LightlyTrain documents commercial, AGPL-3.0, and research licensing options; LightlySSL directs commercial users to sales.

    Pricing Tiers

    LightlyStudio free
    Free to get started

    The official site offers a free signup; enterprise/demo access is available through sales.

    LightlyTrain commercial license
    Contact sales

    Commercial licensing is offered alongside AGPL-3.0 and research licensing.

    Private company; no IPO announcement or public IPO plans identified.

    Target Markets

    Industries & Segments
    • ML engineers and data teams
    • Autonomous-vehicle and automotive companies
    • Robotics companies
    • Computer-vision researchers
    • Manufacturing and industrial companies
    • Retail, agriculture, healthcare, and video-analytics organizations
    Use Cases
    • Computer-vision dataset curation and labeling
    • Autonomous driving and vehicle sensor-data selection
    • Robotics and physical AI
    • Manufacturing and industrial inspection
    • Video analytics
    • Agriculture
    Notable Customers
    • Bosch
    • Meta
    • Google
    • IBM

    Quick Facts

    Headquarters
    Bahnhofstrasse 86, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland
    Founded
    2019
    Entity Type
    AG
    Total Funding
    $10M
    Investors
    Founderful (formerly Wingman Ventures), Y Combinator
    Office Locations
    Zürich

    Funding History

    Seed$3 million
    May 2022
    Wingman Ventures (now Founderful)
    Y Combinator seed$125,000
    2021
    Y Combinator

    History & Milestones

    March 23, 2026

    Lightly's open-source repository announced LightlyStudio as a new project for visualizing, annotating, and managing data.

    October 21, 2025

    Introduced LightlyStudio as the unified data platform for multimodal ML, combining curation, labeling, and embeddings.

    April 2025

    Announced LightlyTrain, enabling SSL and distillation pretraining in a few lines of code.

    April 2025

    LightlyEdge was covered as an embedded AI solution for selecting and transmitting relevant vehicle-camera and sensor data.

    September 2024

    Selected by Innosuisse as one of 33 innovation projects funded through the Swiss Accelerator.

    Key Capabilities

    12
    Automatic embeddings on indexed data
    Text and image similarity search
    Diversity, deduplication, outlier, similarity, class-balancing, and metadata-balanced sampling
    Image and video data curation
    Annotation creation, editing, review, object-level embeddings, and QA
    SAM3 and LightlyTrain auto-labeling plugins

    Integrations & Partnerships

    Platform Integrations

    • AWS S3, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure storage
    • PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning, Fast.ai, and timm-compatible workflows
    • Python SDK, API, Docker/on-premise worker options, and hosted LightlyStudio
    • COCO, YOLO, Pascal VOC and other annotation formats
    • ONNX and TensorRT export/deployment
    • GitHub repositories for LightlyStudio, LightlyTrain, LightlySSL, LabelFormat, and LightlyStudio plugins

    Key Partnerships

    Y Combinator accelerator
    Innosuisse Swiss Accelerator program
    ETH Zurich research ecosystem

    Connect

    Website
    lightly.ai
    GitHub
    lightly-ai
    X / Twitter
    LightlyAI

    AI Topics

    3

    Lightly focuses on these topics:

    Image(1)
    AI Development Libraries(1)
    Model Management(1)
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