Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the French developer best known as the lead developer of VLC Media Player, which has more than 6 billion downloads worldwide, has raised $5 million for his new startup Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI, led the round.
Kempf founded Kyber after concluding that hundreds of millions of robots and drones will operate in public spaces within a few years, and that none of the existing infrastructure can manage them at that scale. Kyber’s core product is a software development kit that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs between an operator and a remote device with minimal latency. The startup’s name references lightsaber crystals from Star Wars, a nod to its core obsession with speed.
“If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.
Kempf initially built the technology as a side project while serving as CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, where the problem was also fundamentally about streaming with minimal lag. Kyber applies the same principles to IoT devices, tuning performance to each device’s available computing power at scale.
“The largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles,” he said. “Imagine you need to manage millions of them. That’s not the same thing.”
Kyber currently deploys across three priority segments: robotics, drones, and remote IT access, where demand has proven particularly strong. The Paris-based startup employs 25 people across offices in San Francisco and Singapore, and operates commercially with customers in defense, telecoms, robotics, and AI.
True to Kempf’s open-source background, the core SDK is freely available, while the company sells a productized enterprise version and deploys forward-embedded engineers for custom implementations, a model similar to Palantir’s approach.
