Lightly secures financing from Silicon Valley

Y-Combinator (YC) is investing in Lightly. The Zurich-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up will receive a total of 125,000 US dollars from the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator. Moreover, YC is supporting the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) spin-off in its efforts to increase proximity to customers and investors on the US market. Lightly now intends to close a seed financing round and refine its core product further.

Lightly has developed what is known as a plug-and-play tool to automate the data preparation process for machine learning applications. For this, the enormous volume of data produced each day must be labelled and fed into a machine learning model. To reduce this huge administrative burden, self-learning algorithms are used by the open source-enabled data platform from Lightly to select the most valuable one percent pf data. According to Lightly, this allows companies to improve their AI model by 20 percent and cut up to 90 percent of costs at the same time.

As detailed in an article published by startupticker.ch, Lightly has gained more than 400 cloud users and a handful of Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, mainly in the USA, in the fields of autonomous driving, robotics and video analytics since going live at the end of 2020. In addition, Lightly has made some parts of its technology available on an open source basis. This framework has been used by industry experts and research labs at some of the best universities. The start-up, which is based at the ETH Entrepreneur Club in Zurich, has also received significant recognition from Jerome Pesenti, Head of Facebook AI, who took to Twitter to praise the self-learning framework. In addition, Lightly’s framework has already accumulated over 1,000 stars on Github, the platform for newly developed software solutions.

According to its own information, YC invests a relatively “small amount of money in a large number of start-ups” twice per year. Following this, the start-up accelerator works intensively with the start-ups to fine-tune their investment pitches before bringing them into contact with interested investors. Furthermore, YC alumni are supported for the entire life of their companies.