Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, downloaded over 6 billion times, is building a startup that could do for physical devices what his video player did for multimedia. His company, Kyber, is developing a low-latency SDK for controlling remote machines in real time, from drones and robots to telecom infrastructure.
Kyber has raised US$5 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, the firm behind Anthropic and Mistral AI. Lightspeed sees the startup as critical infrastructure for the physical AI era, writing on LinkedIn that “physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it.”
Kempf began working on the underlying technology as a side project while serving as CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow. The core challenge is the same one VLC solved for video: synchronizing multiple streams, video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs, with minimal latency, regardless of network conditions.
“If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf told TechCrunch.
Kyber targets what Kempf describes as “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.” That means a teleoperator in a control center piloting a drone on a different continent, or an AI agent managing a fleet of autonomous vehicles across a factory floor.
Open-source core, enterprise delivery
True to Kempf’s open-source roots, Kyber’s core is freely available. The company makes money through an enterprise version with custom features and through forward-deployed engineers who handle bespoke deployments for large customers, a model reminiscent of Palantir’s engagement strategy.
Kyber’s initial priority segments are robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access. On the latter, the company sees an opportunity to challenge Citrix in the remote desktop market, a sector with a sizable total addressable market where incumbents have been slow to modernize.
Headquartered in Paris with offices in San Francisco and Singapore, Kyber has 25 full-time staff, a large share of whom are forward-deployed engineers. The company is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telecom, robotics, and AI.
The scale ambition is notable: existing remote-control solutions typically handle fleets of 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles. Kyber aims to manage millions of devices.
Sources: He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he’s doing that for robots. (TechCrunch, June 19, 2026).