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, bots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as its open-source video software.
Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be on the streets in a few years, this French entrepreneur and open source legend has created Cyberan infrastructure layer for real-time control of remote devices. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data and control inputs with minimal latency.
This dovetails well with the rise of physical AI and is 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. “Native AI is only as good as the underlying systems that run it,” the US VC firm wrote in a Post on LinkedIn announces its investment.
However, Kyber’s potential applications go beyond artificial intelligence. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is built for “all the use cases where the person operating is not in the same place as the computation, which is not in the same place as the action.”
The remote control is 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’re controlling things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.
Kyber’s approach to eliminating latency is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company started as a side project that Kempf built while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its early focus on streaming makes the VLC connection easy to build. But IoT expertise is just as important to optimization—tuning performance to a device’s available compute, at scale—the other core part of what Kyber does.
Kempf says other companies with the resources and needs have already built similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving. “But the biggest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine having to manage millions of them; that’s not the same thing.”
This leap in scale also raises the stakes around observability—knowing that systems are actually working will matter more when AI agents, not humans, manage entire fleets and networks. Even on a much smaller scale, however, there’s a real benefit: you don’t have 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 it will ever become paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a production version to enterprise customers. And it’s not just software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers hands-on, custom development through forward-deployment engineers, or FDE.
FDEs are a large part of Kyber’s team, which currently has 25 full-time employees. The startup is headquartered in Paris, but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects to be a global customer base across a variety of industries. The company says it is already in commercial development with customers in defense, telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence.
To focus its efforts, Kyber has prioritized three areas: robotics, drones of all kinds, 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 pretty big overall addressable market.
Remote IT access isn’t exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems fired up by the problem — and Kyber career page he implies why: “Companies that have tried to solve this have spent years and tens of millions creating custom solutions that will never be shared. We’re creating the version that everyone else can use.”
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