VLC creator launches Kyber for real-time robot control
Original: He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he’s doing that for robots.
Why This Matters
Addresses critical infrastructure gap as physical AI and robot deployment scale, combining video streaming and IoT expertise for enterprise fleet management.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, lead developer of VLC Media Player, founded Kyber, an infrastructure platform for controlling remote robots and drones in real time. The Paris-based startup raised $5 million from Lightspeed Ventures to build low-latency systems synchronizing video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the French developer behind VLC Media Player (downloaded 6 billion times), has launched Kyber, a startup building infrastructure for real-time remote control of robots and drones. The company raised $5 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures, which also backs Anthropic and Mistral AI. Kyber's core product is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency for scenarios where operators, computing power, and physical devices are geographically separated. Kempf believes "hundreds of millions of robots and drones" will soon be in use, aligning with the rise of physical AI. The startup's name references Star Wars lightsaber crystals, emphasizing speed: "every millisecond matters" in real-world control. Kempf developed the technology as a side project while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, leveraging video-streaming expertise combined with IoT optimization. The platform addresses scale challenges—existing remote driving fleets have 2,000-3,000 vehicles, but managing millions requires different infrastructure. Kyber follows an open-source-core plus enterprise-software model similar to Kempf's VLC work, with hands-on deployment services included for customers.