VLC creator Jean-Baptiste Kempf raises $5M to build infrastructure for millions of robots

He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he's doing that for robots.

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, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open source video software. Convinced that "hundreds of millions of robots and drones" will be roaming the streets in a few years, this French serial entrepreneur and open-source legend has been building Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency. This lines up well with the rise of physical AI, and it's part of why the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. "Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it," the American VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing its investment. Kyber's potential applications go well beyond AI, though. Kempf told TechCrunch the platform is built for "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." Remote control is one half of the equation; speed is the other -- and it's what inspired the startup's name, a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. "If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters," Kempf said. Kyber's approach to eliminating lag is rooted firmly in video-streaming technology. The company started as a side project Kempf built while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its early focus on streaming makes the VLC connection an easy one to draw. But IoT expertise matters just as much for optimization -- tuning performance to a device's available compute, at scale -- the other core piece of what Kyber does. Kempf says other companies with the resources and the need have already built similar software for their own use cases, like remote driving. "But the largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that's not the same thing." That jump in scale also raises the stakes on observability -- knowing systems are actually working will matter even more when AI agents, not people, are managing entire fleets and networks. Even at much smaller scale, though, there's a real benefit: not needing to physically reach every device just to push a software update, for example. That range -- from a handful of devices to millions -- means Kyber's user base will likely span far more companies than will ever become paying customers. True to Kempf's roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a productized version to enterprise customers. And it's not just software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers hands-on, custom deployment through forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs. FDEs make up a large part of Kyber's team, which currently numbers 25 full-time staffers. The startup is headquartered in Paris but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects will be a global client base across a variety of industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics, and AI. To focus its efforts, Kyber has been prioritizing three segments: robotics, drones of every kind, and remote IT access, where demand has been particularly strong. In that last segment, Kempf says Kyber aspires to be more than just a Citrix challenger -- but even that comparison alone points to a sizable total addressable market. Remote IT access isn't exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems energized by the problem -- and Kyber's careers page hints at why: "The companies that tried to solve it spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions they'll never share. We're building the version everyone else can use."

The developer behind VLC's 6 billion downloads now wants to connect hundreds of millions of robots

VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf raised $5M led by Lightspeed for Kyber, an open-source SDK that controls remote machines with ultra-low latency. 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.