You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic cone icon — it’s been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf, bots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open-source video software.
Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be walking the streets in a few years, this French serial entrepreneur and open source legend is building. cyberan infrastructure layer for managing remote devices in real-time. Its 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 part of the reason the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Anthropic and Mistral AI backers Lightspeed. “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems that drive it,” said the American VC firm LinkedIn post announces that it has invested.
Kyber’s potential applications go far beyond artificial intelligence. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is built for “all use cases where the worker is not at the same place as the compute, not at the same place as the activity.”
Remote control is half the equation; speed is another – and a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars, which inspired the starter’s name. “If you’re running things in the real world, every millisecond counts,” Kempf said.
Kyber’s approach to latency is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company started as a side project built by Kempf CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadowand its focus on initial streaming makes it easy to pull the VLC link. But the IoT experience is just as important for optimization — scaling performance to a device’s available compute — another key part of what Kyber does.
Kempf says other companies with the resources and needs have developed similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving. “But the biggest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine if you had to manage millions of vehicles; it’s not the same.”
A leap of this scale also increases the risk of observability – when entire fleets and networks are controlled by AI agents rather than humans, it will be even more important to know that systems are actually working. Even on a smaller scale, there’s a real benefit: you don’t need to physically reach every device to push a software update, for example.
This range – from a few devices to millions – means that Kyber’s user base will likely include more companies than those that will become paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a production version to enterprise customers. And it’s not just software: Like Palantir and others, Kyber offers hands-on, custom deployments through advanced engineers, or FDEs.
FDEs make up a large part of the Kyber team, which currently has 25 full-time employees. The startup is headquartered in Paris, but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects to be a global customer base across a variety of industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence.
To focus its efforts, Kyber prioritizes three segments: robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access, where demand is particularly strong. In this latest segment, Kempf says Kyber aspires to be more than just a Citrix competitor — but even that comparison points to a fairly general addressable market.
Remote IT access isn’t all that glamorous, but Kempf seems energized by the challenge — and Kyber’s career page He points to why: “Companies trying to solve this have spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions that they can never share. We’re building a version that everyone can use.”
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