Made your free video player work smoothly. Now he’s doing that with robots.

You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic cone icon; It has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as its open source video software.

Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be roaming the streets within a few years, this French serial entrepreneur and open source legend has been building kyberan infrastructure layer to control remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.

This aligns well with the rise of physical AI, and is part of the reason the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, which also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. “Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems that run it,” the American venture capital firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing your investment.

However, Kyber’s potential applications go far beyond AI. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is designed for “all use cases where the person trading is not in the same place as the computer, which is not in the same place as the action.”

The remote control is half of the equation; speed is the other, and it’s what inspired the startup’s name, a nod to Star Wars’ lightsaber crystals. “If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.

Kyber’s approach to eliminating lag is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company began as a side project that Kempf built while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadowand its initial focus on streaming makes the VLC connection easy to establish. But IoT expertise is equally important to optimization (matching performance to a device’s available compute, at scale), the other centerpiece of what Kyber does.

Kempf says other companies with the resources and need have already created similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving. “But 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.”

That leap in scale also raises the stakes for observability: Knowing that systems actually work will be even more important when AI agents, not people, are managing entire fleets and networks. However, even at a much smaller scale, there is a real benefit: not having to physically reach out to each device just to push a software update, for example.

That range (from a handful of devices to millions) means Kyber’s user base will likely encompass many more businesses than will ever become paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a production version to enterprise customers. And it’s not just about software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers practical, custom implementation through advanced engineers or FDE.

FDEs make up a large part of the Kyber team, which currently has 25 full-time employees. The startup is headquartered in Paris, but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it hopes will be a global customer base across a variety of industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with defense, telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence customers.

To focus its efforts, Kyber has been prioritizing three segments: robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access, where demand has been particularly strong. On that last segment, Kempf says Kyber aims to be more than just a Citrix challenger, but even that comparison alone points to a sizable total addressable market.

Remote access to IT isn’t exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems excited about the problem, and that of Kyber. careers page hints why: “The companies trying to solve it spent years and tens of millions creating custom solutions that they will never share. We’re building the version that everyone else can use.”