Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, has raised $5 million for his startup Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which also led Mistral AI’s record-breaking seed round and has since invested in Anthropic. OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures also participated.

Kyber’s core product is an SDK that synchronises video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with what the company claims is the lowest achievable latency. In a February 2025 demonstration at the Mile High Video conference, Kempf showed Kyber achieving 8 milliseconds of glass-to-glass latency, the time it takes for a video frame to be captured, encoded, transmitted, decoded, and displayed. The platform is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, the open-source projects Kempf has spent two decades contributing to.

The connection to VLC is more than biographical. VLC has been downloaded more than 6 billion times, a figure confirmed at CES 2025, and the video-streaming expertise behind it is what gives Kyber its technical foundation. Kempf built the startup as a side project while serving as CTO at Shadow, the French cloud gaming company, before spinning it out.

Kyber is designed for what Kempf calls “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 covers robotics, drones, remote vehicles, cloud rendering, and remote IT access. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defence, telco, robotics, and AI.

The startup is betting that the infrastructure problem will only get harder as fleets scale. Kempf told TechCrunch that the largest remote driving fleets today manage perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 vehicles. Scaling to millions requires a different kind of platform, one that also handles observability so operators and AI agents know systems are actually working.

Kyber is prioritising three segments: robotics, drones, and remote IT access, where Kempf says demand has been particularly strong. In the remote IT segment, he positions Kyber as a potential challenger to Citrix, which points to a large addressable market even before the robotics opportunity materialises.

True to Kempf’s open-source roots, the core project is freely available under a dual licence. The company sells a productised version to enterprise customers and, like Palantir, deploys forward-deployed engineers for custom integrations. FDEs make up a significant share of Kyber’s 25-person team.

The Paris-based company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. The geographic spread reflects the breadth of the opportunity: the same SDK that lets a technician push a software update to a remote device can also let an AI agent manage an entire drone fleet. Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year, and most of those robots will need a control and observability layer.

Lightspeed called the investment a bet on the plumbing beneath physical AI. “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it,” the firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the deal.

For Kempf, the thesis is simpler: if hundreds of millions of robots and drones are coming, someone needs to build the nervous system that connects them. He is betting the person who made video playback work for 6 billion users is the right one to do it.