VLC has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. Its lead developer just used the same low-latency, resource-efficient engineering that made that possible to go after a problem that has nothing to do with watching video: keeping robots and drones connected to whoever, or whatever, is controlling them.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the French open-source veteran behind VLC Media Player, has been building Kyber, an infrastructure layer designed to synchronize video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs for remote devices in real time. The company just raised $5 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the firm that has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI.
From VLC to a Robotics Infrastructure Bet
Kempf is best known as the lead developer of VLC, the free media player with the orange traffic-cone icon. That project alone would be a career. But Kyber traces back to his time as CTO at Shadow, the French cloud gaming startup, where the company started as an internal side project before being spun out on its own.
The name is a deliberate reference to Star Wars, where kyber crystals power lightsabers. The logic behind the name is also the company's whole pitch: speed and remote control are two sides of the same problem. As Kempf put it, "if you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters."
What Kyber's SDK Actually Synchronizes
Kyber's core product is an SDK that pulls together video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs and keeps them synchronized with minimal lag. Kempf describes the target use case broadly: any situation where the person operating a device, the compute processing its data, and the physical action itself are all happening in three different places.
That covers a wide range of scenarios beyond robotics, including remote vehicles, cloud rendering, and remote desktop access. It's a deliberately horizontal pitch rather than a single-industry one, which is also why Kyber's customer base spans more sectors than its current revenue likely reflects.
Why Lightspeed Bet on the "Boring" Infrastructure Layer
Lightspeed framed its investment around the idea that AI systems acting in the physical world are only as reliable as the software carrying their signals, a thesis the firm spelled out when it announced the round on LinkedIn. That framing connects Kyber to the broader rise of physical AI, where models increasingly need to act through real hardware rather than just generate text or images.
It's worth noting that none of this is unique to AI. Kempf has said Kyber's potential applications extend well beyond it, and the company's near-term commercial traction, in defense, telco, robotics, and remote IT, doesn't depend on AI agents becoming the primary operators of these systems at all.
The Fleet-Scale Problem Nobody Has Solved Yet
Companies with enough resources have already built similar remote-control software for their own needs, remote driving being the clearest example. But according to Kempf, even the largest of those fleets currently top out around 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles. Managing millions of devices is a different engineering problem entirely, one that also raises the stakes on observability: knowing that systems are actually working becomes more important once AI agents, rather than people, are the ones managing entire fleets.
Even short of that scale, there's a simpler benefit on offer: not having to physically reach every device just to push a software update.
Kempf is also betting on a much bigger version of this future. He's convinced that hundreds of millions of robots and drones will be operating in public spaces within a few years. That's worth flagging clearly: it's Kempf's own forecast, not a confirmed industry projection, and the article gives no third-party data to back the specific number. Some of that ubiquity is already visible in the humanoid robot market, where models from companies like Unitree are already shipping at scale, though general-purpose street robots and drones at the volume Kempf describes remain a prediction, not a present reality.
Open Source Core, Forward-Deployed Engineers for Enterprise
True to Kempf's background, Kyber's core project is open source, while the company sells a productized version to enterprise customers. It also offers hands-on custom deployment through forward-deployed engineers, a model associated with Palantir, where specialists embed directly with a client to build and adapt the system to that client's environment.
Forward-deployed engineers make up a significant share of Kyber's 25-person team. The company is headquartered in Paris, with additional offices in San Francisco and Singapore, positioning it for what it expects to be a global customer base. Kyber says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics, and AI, though the announcement doesn't name specific clients in any of those categories.
Kyber is prioritizing three segments: robotics, drones, and remote IT access, where Kempf says demand has been particularly strong. On that last one, he wants Kyber to be more than a Citrix challenger, an ambition that signals scale rather than a current market position; no share or revenue figures were given. Kyber's own careers page argues that companies that previously tried to solve this problem spent years and significant money building proprietary systems they'll never share, and frames Kyber as the shared alternative to that fragmentation.
My Take
The numbers here are smaller than the ambition. A $5 million round, a 25-person team, and three priority segments is a seed-stage story, not the hundreds-of-millions-of-robots future Kempf is selling. That gap is normal at this stage, but it's worth keeping in view.
The strongest part of the pitch isn't the robotics angle, it's the fleet-scale problem. Companies running 2,000 to 3,000 remote vehicles and building their own infrastructure from scratch is a real, quantifiable pain point, and Kyber doesn't need physical AI to go mainstream to make money off solving it. Remote IT access, the least glamorous of the three segments, might end up being the biggest one.
Boring infrastructure plays usually age better than the flashy AI thesis bolted onto them.
- Kyber raised $5 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI.
- Founder Jean-Baptiste Kempf is the lead developer of VLC Media Player, which has surpassed 6 billion downloads.
- Kyber's core SDK synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs for remote devices with minimal latency.
- The core project is open source; Kyber sells a productized enterprise version with custom deployment support.
- The startup has 25 full-time staff, with offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore.
- Kempf's prediction of "hundreds of millions" of robots and drones within a few years is his own forecast, not a verified industry figure.
FAQ
What is Kyber?
Kyber is an infrastructure startup founded by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC. It builds software for controlling robots, drones, vehicles, and other remote devices in real time with minimal latency.
Who is Jean-Baptiste Kempf?
Kempf is a French open-source veteran and the lead developer of VLC Media Player. He previously served as CTO at Shadow, a French cloud gaming startup, where Kyber began as a side project.
How much funding has Kyber raised?
Kyber raised $5 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Is Kyber's software open source?
Kyber's core project is open source. The company separately sells a productized enterprise version, with custom deployment support for larger clients through forward-deployed engineers.
Conclusion
Kyber hasn't disclosed a valuation, named specific customers beyond broad industry categories, or shared technical benchmark numbers for latency. The defense, telco, robotics, and AI deployments mentioned in the announcement aren't detailed beyond those labels. Until more specifics surface, the strongest evidence for Kyber's pitch is still the problem it describes, not yet proof that it has solved that problem at scale.
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