The creator of VLC, which has reached 6 billion downloads, is now aiming to link hundreds of millions of robots.

      TL;DRVLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf has secured $5 million for his startup Kyber, an open-source SDK designed for controlling remote machines with ultra-low latency. The funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also previously led notable investments in Mistral AI and Anthropic. OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures also participated in the financing.

      Kyber’s main offering is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs while claiming to achieve the lowest possible latency. During a demonstration at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025, Kempf showcased Kyber achieving just 8 milliseconds of glass-to-glass latency—the duration it takes for a video frame to be captured, encoded, transmitted, decoded, and displayed. The platform is developed using FFmpeg and VLC, the open-source projects to which Kempf has contributed for the past twenty years.

      The connection to VLC extends beyond mere biography. With over 6 billion downloads confirmed at CES 2025, VLC’s video-streaming expertise provides the technical underpinnings for Kyber. Kempf began developing the startup as a side venture while serving as CTO at Shadow, a French cloud gaming company, before ultimately spinning it off.

      Kyber aims to address what Kempf identifies as “all the use cases where the operator is not co-located with the compute, which is not co-located with the action.” This encompasses fields such as robotics, drones, remote vehicles, cloud rendering, and remote IT access. The company claims to already have commercial deployments with clients in defense, telecommunications, robotics, and AI.

      The startup believes that the infrastructure challenges will become more complex as fleets expand. Kempf informed TechCrunch that today’s largest remote driving fleets operate about 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles; reaching millions necessitates a different type of platform capable of handling observability so that operators and AI agents can confirm system functionality.

      Kyber is concentrating on three key areas: robotics, drones, and remote IT access, where Kempf notes demand has been particularly robust. In the remote IT space, he positions Kyber as a possible alternative to Citrix, indicating a vast addressable market prior to the full emergence of the robotics sector.

      True to his open-source background, the core project is freely accessible under a dual license. The company also offers a productized version to enterprise clients and, similar to Palantir, deploys forward-deployed engineers for tailored integrations. These engineers constitute a sizable portion of Kyber’s 25-person workforce.

      The Paris-based firm maintains offices in San Francisco and Singapore. This geographic distribution highlights the wide-ranging opportunity: the SDK that enables a technician to issue a software update to a remote device can also empower an AI agent to manage an entire fleet of drones. Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year, and most of these robots will require a control and observability layer.

      Lightspeed referred to the investment as a wager on the foundational elements supporting physical AI, stating, “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it” in a LinkedIn post announcing the investment.

      For Kempf, the concept is more straightforward: as hundreds of millions of robots and drones come into existence, someone needs to create the nervous system that links them. He is confident that the individual who has successfully facilitated video playback for 6 billion users is the right person to undertake this task.