VLC founder builds Kyber for real-time robots control

Kyber minimal-latency – Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer behind VLC Media Player, is betting that the same obsession with smooth streaming will become essential infrastructure for robots and drones—backed by a $5 million funding round to build Kyber.

When you press play on VLC Media Player, the world stays still. No waiting. No buffering. For Jean-Baptiste Kempf, that experience isn’t just nostalgia—it’s the blueprint.

VLC, the free video player with the orange traffic-cone icon, has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. Kempf’s next target is making remote machines feel just as immediate. He argues that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be roaming the streets in a few years. and he’s building Kyber. an infrastructure layer meant to control remote devices in real time.

At the center of Kyber is an SDK designed to keep multiple streams aligned with minimal latency: video. audio. sensor data. and control inputs. Kempf frames the problem plainly—this platform is for “all the use cases where the person who’s operating is not in the same place as the compute. which is not in the same place as the action.” In other words. speed can’t be an afterthought when humans are steering something far away.

That urgency is also behind the startup’s name, a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. “If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.

Kyber’s growth pitch is finding momentum as the industry talks more about physical AI—systems that can act in the real world rather than just respond on a screen. A Paris-based startup. Kyber raised a $5 million round led by Lightspeed. a firm that has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. Lightspeed’s LinkedIn post announcing the investment said: “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it.”.

The underlying idea is that remote control isn’t enough unless the platform can also watch what’s happening closely enough to keep everything reliable. Kyber’s approach is rooted in video-streaming technology, which makes the VLC connection hard to ignore. The company started as a side project Kempf built while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow. and early work leaned on streaming. But the company says IoT expertise is equally important—optimizing performance to the compute a device actually has. and doing it at scale.

That scaling question is where Kyber tries to separate itself from what came before. Kempf says other companies with the resources and the need have built similar software for their own use cases. like remote driving. But he draws a stark line between managing a few hundred or a few thousand machines and managing fleets that could reach into the millions. “But the largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that’s not the same thing.”.

Bigger fleets change the stakes for observability—the ability to know systems are actually working. Even at smaller scale. the payoff is practical: there’s real value in not having to physically reach every device just to push a software update. When AI agents—not people—are managing fleets and networks, that kind of visibility becomes even more critical.

Kyber’s business model mirrors its origin story. The core project is open source, while the company sells a productized version to enterprise customers. It’s also not only software: the startup offers hands-on custom deployment through forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs. Those FDEs make up a large part of Kyber’s team, which currently numbers 25 full-time staffers.

Kyber is headquartered in Paris, but it has offices in San Francisco and Singapore, with expectations for a global client base across multiple industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics, and AI.

Kyber is currently focusing on three segments: robotics. drones of every kind. and remote IT access. where Kempf says demand has been particularly strong. In that last area. he says the platform wants to be more than just a Citrix challenger—though the comparison alone points to a large potential market.

Remote IT access may not grab headlines the way robots do. but Kempf seems energized by the grind of solving it. The startup’s careers page says: “The companies that tried to solve it spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions they’ll never share. We’re building the version everyone else can use.”.

VLC Jean-Baptiste Kempf Kyber robotics drones real-time control minimal latency SDK open source Lightspeed Physical AI remote IT access observability forward-deployed engineers