You have likely used VLC Media Player, the free video application marked by its orange traffic-cone logo, downloaded more than six billion times. Yet its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, believes robots will soon match the reach of his open-source video tool.

Expecting hundreds of millions of robots and drones to appear on streets within years, the French entrepreneur and open-source advocate has created Kyber, an infrastructure platform for real-time remote device management. Its central offering is an SDK that aligns video, audio, sensor information, and control signals with very low delay.

The timing fits the growth of physical AI, which helped the Paris startup secure a five-million-dollar funding round led by Lightspeed, an investor in Anthropic and Mistral AI. Physical AI succeeds only when supported by strong underlying systems, the firm noted when announcing the investment.

Kyber extends past AI uses. Kempf explained that the platform targets situations where the operator, the computing resources, and the physical action occur in separate locations.

Remote operation forms one part of the challenge; speed forms the other, reflected in the company name drawn from Star Wars lightsaber crystals. Every millisecond counts when directing real-world objects, Kempf said.

Kyber reduces lag by building on video-streaming methods. The project began as a side effort while Kempf served as CTO at cloud-gaming firm Shadow, so the VLC link is natural. IoT optimization, adjusting performance to each device compute capacity across large deployments, supplies the second key element.

Kempf noted that well-funded organizations have already created similar internal tools for tasks such as remote driving. Yet current fleets reach only two or three thousand vehicles, far short of the millions Kyber aims to handle.

Greater scale increases the need for observability, ensuring systems function correctly when AI agents oversee fleets rather than human operators. Even at smaller sizes the advantage is clear, since teams avoid physical visits simply to install updates.

Kyber therefore serves users from a few devices to millions. Following Kempf open-source background, the core code remains freely available while the company offers a commercial version to enterprises. It also supplies custom deployments through forward-deployed engineers, similar to practices at Palantir.

These engineers form a major share of the twenty-five-person team. Headquartered in Paris, the startup maintains offices in San Francisco and Singapore to serve clients across defense, telecommunications, robotics, and AI sectors.

Current priorities include robotics, all forms of drones, and remote IT access, where demand has risen sharply. In the IT segment Kempf positions Kyber beyond a simple Citrix alternative, pointing to a large addressable market.

Although remote IT access lacks glamour, Kempf finds the problem compelling. The careers page captures the goal: companies that tackled it previously spent years and large sums on private solutions they would never release, whereas Kyber builds a version available to everyone.