The story of Lightly goes back to 2019 when Igor was doing research in computer vision at ETH Zurich. While developing deep learning models, he wondered whether he would need all the collected data. Having to label, all his data manually sounded dreadful to him. Thus, he started looking for a smart way to filter and select his raw data. Unfortunately, he couldn't find a plug-and-play solution, which is why he started developing a solution himself.