VLC Creator Builds Infrastructure for Real-Time Robot Control

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer behind VLC Media Player with over 6 billion downloads, is now tackling a new frontier: remote device control. His Paris-based startup Kyber has raised a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, also backers of Anthropic and Mistral AI.

Kyber provides an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Its core SDK synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency. Kempf predicts that hundreds of millions of robots and drones will roam streets in a few years, creating a massive need for such technology.

The platform aligns with the rise of physical AI, as Lightspeed noted that "physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it." However, Kyber's applications extend beyond AI to any scenario where an operator, compute, and action are in different locations.

Kempf's background in video streaming is evident: the project started as a side project while he was CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow. But IoT expertise is equally critical for optimizing performance across diverse devices. Kempf argues that managing millions of vehicles is fundamentally different from today's largest fleets of a few thousand.

Kyber is open source, with a commercial enterprise version. The company also offers forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) for custom deployments, similar to Palantir. The team of 25 has offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore.

Kyber is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics, and AI. It focuses on three segments: robotics, drones, and remote IT access. In the latter, Kempf sees a market even larger than Citrix's. The company's careers page highlights the ambition: building the version everyone else can use, after others spent years on custom solutions.