Tech Desk: The visionary behind the ubiquitous VLC Media Player, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, is now setting his sights on a new frontier: real-time robot control. His latest venture, Kyber, an innovative Kyber robotics platform, recently secured $5 million in funding led by Lightspeed, promising to revolutionize how we interact with and manage autonomous devices.

Kyber addresses a critical challenge in the burgeoning world of physical AI: the need for ultra-low latency communication between operators and remote machines. Leveraging Kempf’s deep expertise in video streaming, the platform provides an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with unparalleled speed. This is crucial for applications ranging from remote-controlled vehicles to vast fleets of autonomous drones, where every millisecond counts.

While other companies have built similar solutions internally, Kyber aims to be the open-source infrastructure layer accessible to all, from small teams to enterprises managing millions of devices. The company offers a productized version for commercial clients, along with hands-on custom deployment through forward-deployed engineers. This dual approach echoes Kempf’s open-source roots while building a scalable business.

With offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore, Kyber is already deploying commercially across defense, telco, robotics, and AI sectors. By solving the complex problem of scalable, real-time remote device management, the Kyber robotics platform is poised to become as foundational to the future of robotics as VLC is to media playback.