VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf raises $5M for Kyber, an open source SDK for robot connectivity

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 invested in Anthropic. OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures also participated.

The SDK 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.

Built on FFmpeg and VLC foundations

Kyber is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, the open source projects Kempf has contributed to for two decades. 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 core. 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 is 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.

Scaling from thousands to millions of robots

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, pointing to a large addressable market even before the robotics opportunity materialises.
• 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.
• Kyber's 25 person team includes a significant share of forward deployed engineers. The Paris based company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore.
• 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.

Building the nervous system for physical AI

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.