You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic cone icon. This player has been downloaded over 6 billion times. But according to lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots may soon become as ubiquitous as his open source video software.
Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be roaming the streets within a few years, the French serial entrepreneur and open source legend has been building Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data and control inputs with minimal latency.
This aligns well with the rise of physical AI and is one of the reasons why the Paris-based startup was able to raise $5 million in funding, led by Lightspeed, which also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems that run it,” the US VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the investment.
But Kyber’s potential applications go far beyond AI. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is built for “any use case where the person doing the work is not co-located with the compute and is not co-located with the work.”
Remote control is half the equation. Speed is another. This is what inspired the startup’s name, a nod to Star Wars lightsaber modifications. “When you control things in the real world, every millisecond counts,” Kempf said.
Kyber’s approach to eliminating lag is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company started as a side project that Kempf built as CTO of cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its initial focus on streaming made it easy to draw connections to VLC. But IoT expertise is just as important as another key part of what Kyber does: optimization—tailoring performance to a device’s available compute at scale.
Kempf said other companies with the resources and need have already built similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving. “But today, the largest fleets have 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles. Imagine having to manage millions of vehicles. It’s not the same thing.”
This leap in scale also raises the stakes for observability. Knowing whether the system actually works is even more important when entire vehicles and networks are managed by AI agents rather than humans. But there are real benefits, even on a much smaller scale. For example, you don’t need to be physically connected to every device to push software updates.
That range, from a handful of devices to millions of devices, means Kyber’s user base likely spans far more companies than will ever be paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, and the company sells production versions to enterprise customers. Like Palantir and others, Kyber offers not only software but also hands-on custom deployment through forward deployment engineers (FDEs).
FDEs make up a large part of the Kyber team, which currently consists of 25 full-time employees. The startup is headquartered in Paris, but with offices in San Francisco and Singapore, it is expected to serve a global customer base across a variety of industries. The company said it is already in commercial deployments with customers in the defense, communications, robotics and AI sectors.
To focus its efforts, Kyber prioritized three sectors where demand was particularly strong: robotics, drones of all kinds, and remote IT access. In the final part, Kempf says that Kyber aspires to be more than just a Citrix challenger. But just that comparison shows that the overall market size is quite large.
Remote IT access may not be all that glamorous, but Kempf seems energized by the problem. And Kyber’s career page hints at why: “Companies trying to solve this problem have spent years and tens of millions of dollars building custom solutions that they will never share. We’re building a version that others can use.”
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