VLC Developer Raises $5M to Connect Robots

VLC Media Player lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf raised $5 million for Kyber, a Paris-based startup building an open-source SDK for remote device control, per TechCrunch and The Next Web. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners - which has also invested in Anthropic and Mistral AI - with OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures participating. Kempf previously served as CTO at Shadow, the cloud gaming startup, and built Kyber as a side project there before spinning it out. Lightspeed wrote in its announcement: "Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it."

Kyber's core product is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency. The company demonstrated 8 milliseconds glass-to-glass latency at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025 - glass-to-glass measuring the full path from camera capture through encode, transmit, decode, and display. The SDK is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, open-source projects Kempf has contributed to for over two decades. Kempf told TechCrunch the platform is designed 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" - covering robotics, drones, remote vehicles, cloud rendering, and remote IT access.

Kempf frames the key problem as what happens when remote fleets grow from thousands to millions. "The largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that's not the same thing," he told TechCrunch. That jump in scale compounds the observability challenge: knowing that systems across a fleet are actually working will matter even more when AI agents - not human operators - manage entire fleets. Kyber's SDK includes observability primitives alongside control and streaming for this reason.

Kyber's core SDK is freely available under a dual licence. The company sells a productized enterprise version and, like Palantir, deploys forward-deployed engineers for custom integrations - a model that makes up a significant portion of its 25-person team. The company is already in commercial deployment in defence, telco, robotics, and AI. In the remote IT segment, Kempf positions Kyber as a potential challenger to Citrix, pointing to a large addressable market independent of the robotics opportunity. Kyber is headquartered in Paris, with offices in San Francisco and Singapore.

Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the prior year, per The Next Web. Most of those deployments will need a control and observability layer. Kyber's bet is that infrastructure built on battle-tested open-source video tooling - the same stack behind 6 billion VLC downloads - can serve as the nervous system beneath physical AI at scale.