VLC developer created Kyber

You've probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic cone icon. The app has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. According to the project's lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be as ubiquitous as the open-source video software it provides.

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

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This aligns well with the rise of natural AI, and why the Paris-based startup managed to raise a $5 million funding round led by Lightspeed, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. “Natural AI is only as good as the underlying systems that run it,” the US VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing its investment.

But Kyber’s potential applications go beyond AI. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is designed for “all use cases where the human operator is not in the same space as the computer, which is not in the same space as the action.”

Remote control is one half of the equation. Speed ​​is the other – and that’s what inspired the startup’s name, a reference to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. “If you’re controlling things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.

Kyber’s approach to eliminating latency is firmly rooted in video-streaming technology. The company began as a side project that Kempf created while he was CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its initial focus on streaming makes VLC connectivity easy to deploy. But the IoT expertise is just as important for optimization — tuning performance to a device’s available computing power, at scale — the other core part of what Kyber does.

To focus its efforts, Kyber has prioritized three segments: robotics, drones of all kinds, and remote IT access, where demand has been particularly strong. In that last segment, Kempf says Kyber aspires to be more than just a competitor to Citrix — but even that comparison alone shows a pretty big overall market it can tap.

Remote IT access isn't perfect, but Kempf seems motivated by the problem — and a Kyber page hints at why: "Companies that have tried to solve this have spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions that will never be shared. We're building the version that everyone else can use."

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.