You’ve probably used VLC Media Player. VLC Media Player is a free video player with an orange traffic cone icon that has been downloaded over 6 billion times. But its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kemp, says the robot will soon become almost as popular as his open-source video software.
Believing 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 is building Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal delay.
This aligns well with the rise of physical AI, and is one of the reasons the Paris-based startup was able to raise $5 million in a round led by Lightspeed, which was also backed by Anthropic AI and Mistral AI. “The performance of physical AI is determined by the underlying systems that run it,” the American VC firm said in a LinkedIn post announcing the investment.
However, Kyber’s potential applications go far beyond AI. Kemp told TechCrunch that the platform is built for “all use cases where the person doing the operation is not co-located with the compute, and the compute is not co-located with the action.”
The remote control is half the equation. The other thing is speed. And that’s how the startup gets its name, after the lightsaber crystal from Star Wars. “When you’re controlling things in the real world, every millisecond counts,” Kemp says.
Kyber’s approach to eliminating latency is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company started as a side project that Kempf built during his time as CTO of cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its early focus on streaming made VLC connectivity a no-brainer. But IoT expertise is just as important for another core part of what Kyber does: optimization, which adjusts performance at scale to a device’s available compute.
Other companies with the resources and need are already building similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving, Kemp said. “But the largest fleets today probably have 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine having to manage millions of vehicles. It’s not the same.”
This leap in scale also raises the stakes for observability. When AI agents rather than humans manage fleets and entire networks, knowing what the system is actually doing becomes even more important. However, there are real benefits even at a much smaller scale. For example, you no longer need to physically access every device just to push software updates.
Its range (from a few devices to millions) means that Kyber’s user base is likely to span far more businesses than will become paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, but the company sells production versions to enterprise customers. And it’s not just software. Like Palantir and other companies, Kyber also offers hands-on custom deployments through Forward Deployment Engineers (FDEs).
FDEs make up the majority of Kyber’s team, which currently has 25 full-time staff members. The startup is headquartered in Paris, but also has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support a global customer base across various industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, communications, robotics, and AI.
Kyber has prioritized three areas to focus its efforts: robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access, where demand is particularly strong. In the final part, Kemp says that Kyber aims to be more than just a Citrix challenger, but that comparison alone shows that the total addressable market is quite large.
Remote IT access isn’t always sexy, but Kempf seems encouraged by the issue. Kyber’s careers page suggests why. “Companies that tried to solve this spent years and tens of millions of dollars building custom solutions that would never be shared. We’re building a version that everyone else can use.”
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