Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer behind VLC Media Player, has raised $5 million to build Kyber, a software infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The funding round, announced in 2026, was led by Lightspeed, the venture firm that has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI.
Kyber’s core product is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency. The Paris-based startup is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telecom, robotics, and AI, and maintains additional offices in San Francisco and Singapore. The team currently numbers 25 full-time employees, many of whom are forward-deployed engineers who handle custom implementations for enterprise clients.
Kempf founded Kyber as a side project while serving as CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow. The platform is built, he told TechCrunch, 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.” The startup’s name references lightsaber crystals from Star Wars — a nod to the speed priority at its core. “If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.
Kyber is targeting three segments: robotics, drones, and remote IT access, where Kempf says demand has been particularly strong. The company positions itself as a potential challenger to established remote-access tools like Citrix. True to Kempf’s open-source background — VLC has been downloaded more than 6 billion times — the core Kyber project is open source, while a productized version is sold to enterprise customers.
Kempf argues that existing remote-control solutions, built by individual companies for their own fleets, will not scale to the volume he anticipates. “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.” That scale also raises questions around observability, particularly as AI agents take on more fleet management responsibilities.
Source: TechCrunch