Deep-tech founders inherit a problem software entrepreneurs can often avoid: the product may work years before the company does. Lightly's core technology grew out of years of scientific research into using ultraviolet signatures to identify substances. Turning that research into a venture-backed company required a different skill set, and that is where Monika Štěpánová entered the story.
Štěpánová, Lightly's co-founder and chief executive, has a background spanning business, economics and biochemistry. The combination is unusually well matched to the task. Lightly is not selling a consumer gadget. It is trying to persuade police, forensic teams and public-safety organisations that a new method of substance analysis can become part of operational decision-making.
The product is not just a detector
Lightly describes its patented UV-Fingerprint method as a way to move substance identification closer to the field. Traditional forensic workflows can involve samples travelling to laboratories and results arriving well after the initial seizure or investigation. Lightly's ambition is to shorten that loop and then use software to connect results across cases.
That second part is commercially important. A device that identifies a substance is a piece of laboratory or field equipment. A system that can identify substances, link matching signatures and help investigators see patterns across seizures begins to look like forensic intelligence infrastructure. The latter creates a much larger potential software and data layer around the underlying chemistry.
Why the US became part of the story early
Štěpánová's founder path has been unusually transatlantic for a young Brno company. Participation in the US State Department-backed Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative helped expose the team to American institutions and networks. Lightly later secured a Golden Ticket placement at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Alabama, giving the company access to laboratory and office infrastructure while it pursued US relationships.
The move is a reminder that internationalisation for Czech deep tech does not always look like opening a sales office after product-market fit. In regulated and institutional markets, the product itself may need to be developed alongside the organisations expected to use it. Access to laboratories, agencies and domain experts can matter as much as access to venture capital.
A founder translating between science and procurement
Štěpánová's role is therefore partly translation. Researchers need to know whether the method is scientifically robust. Investors need to understand the addressable market. Police and forensic users need reliability, workflow integration and evidence that the tool solves a real operational constraint. Regulators and procurement teams need an entirely different set of assurances.
That makes Lightly a useful counterpoint to Czechia's better-known SaaS companies. The engineering challenge is only one component of company formation. Sales cycles can be long, hardware and laboratory work require capital, and adoption depends on institutional trust. Deep tech can create defensible intellectual property, but it also asks founders to survive much longer periods between invention and scalable revenue.
What Lightly says about Brno
Lightly also fits a pattern CBR has tracked in Brno: commercially ambitious companies emerging from the overlap between universities, science and the South Moravian innovation ecosystem. Prague remains Czechia's dominant venture hub, but Brno has a different comparative advantage in research-heavy engineering and scientific technology.
Whether Lightly becomes a major forensic platform is still an open question, and the company remains early enough that its international ambitions should not be confused with scaled deployment. But the founder story already illustrates something important about Czech deep tech: the route from a local laboratory to a global market is increasingly being designed from the beginning, rather than treated as a distant second stage.