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VLC Creator Jean-Baptiste Kempf Raises $5 M for Low-Latency Remote-Control SDK Kyber
Jean‑Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of the VLC media player, has secured a $5 million seed round for his new startup Kyber. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures.
Kyber offers an open‑source software development kit (SDK) that synchronises video, audio, sensor data and control inputs with ultra‑low latency. In a demonstration at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025, the company showed an 8‑millisecond glass‑to‑glass latency – the time required for a frame to be captured, encoded, transmitted, decoded and displayed. The platform is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, the open‑source projects that Kempf has contributed to for more than two decades.
The startup was spun out of Shadow, a French cloud‑gaming company where Kempf served as chief technology officer. Shadow’s technology delivers remote access to a full Windows 10 PC, and the experience of streaming high‑fidelity video informed Kyber’s focus on real‑time control.
According to reports, Kyber is already in commercial deployment with customers in defence, telecommunications, robotics and artificial‑intelligence firms. The company says it is targeting three priority segments: robotics, drones and remote IT access. In the remote‑IT space, Kyber positions itself as a potential challenger to established vendors such as Citrix.
Kyber’s business model blends an open‑source core with a productised, enterprise‑grade offering. The company sells a commercial version of the SDK and deploys forward‑deployed engineers to help customers integrate the platform into their own systems. Forward‑deployed engineers represent a significant portion of Kyber’s 25‑person team.
Lightspeed’s announcement described the investment as a bet on the “plumbing beneath physical AI.” The firm noted that physical‑AI systems – such as fleets of robots and drones – will need robust control and observability layers as they scale to millions of devices.
Kempf’s thesis, as stated in public statements, is that if hundreds of millions of robots and drones are coming, someone needs to build the nervous system that connects them. He believes that the expertise required to make VLC work for more than six billion downloads positions him to solve the latency problem that underpins remote‑device control.
Kyber’s headquarters are in Paris, with additional offices in San Francisco and Singapore. The geographic spread reflects the breadth of the opportunity: the same SDK that lets a technician push a software update to a remote device can also let an AI agent manage an entire drone fleet.
The company’s dual‑licence model keeps the core code freely available while allowing enterprises to purchase a commercial version that includes support and custom integration services. The open‑source foundation also aligns with the broader trend of deep‑tech firms leveraging community contributions to accelerate development.
As of now, Kyber has raised $5 million, has a team of 25 employees, and is operating in three key verticals. The next milestones for the company include scaling its infrastructure to support larger fleets, expanding its customer base in the defence and telecommunications sectors, and further refining its latency metrics.
The funding round comes at a time when global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year. With the rapid growth of autonomous systems, the need for reliable, low‑latency control infrastructure is expected to increase.
Kyber’s current status is that it has secured seed funding, has a commercial customer base, and is actively developing its product. The company has not yet announced a product launch date or a pricing strategy for its enterprise offering.
The startup’s future will be shaped by its ability to demonstrate consistent, sub‑10‑millisecond latency in production environments, to secure additional enterprise contracts, and to attract further investment as it moves beyond the seed stage.
Kyber offers an open‑source software development kit (SDK) that synchronises video, audio, sensor data and control inputs with ultra‑low latency. In a demonstration at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025, the company showed an 8‑millisecond glass‑to‑glass latency – the time required for a frame to be captured, encoded, transmitted, decoded and displayed. The platform is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, the open‑source projects that Kempf has contributed to for more than two decades.
The startup was spun out of Shadow, a French cloud‑gaming company where Kempf served as chief technology officer. Shadow’s technology delivers remote access to a full Windows 10 PC, and the experience of streaming high‑fidelity video informed Kyber’s focus on real‑time control.
According to reports, Kyber is already in commercial deployment with customers in defence, telecommunications, robotics and artificial‑intelligence firms. The company says it is targeting three priority segments: robotics, drones and remote IT access. In the remote‑IT space, Kyber positions itself as a potential challenger to established vendors such as Citrix.
Kyber’s business model blends an open‑source core with a productised, enterprise‑grade offering. The company sells a commercial version of the SDK and deploys forward‑deployed engineers to help customers integrate the platform into their own systems. Forward‑deployed engineers represent a significant portion of Kyber’s 25‑person team.
Lightspeed’s announcement described the investment as a bet on the “plumbing beneath physical AI.” The firm noted that physical‑AI systems – such as fleets of robots and drones – will need robust control and observability layers as they scale to millions of devices.
Kempf’s thesis, as stated in public statements, is that if hundreds of millions of robots and drones are coming, someone needs to build the nervous system that connects them. He believes that the expertise required to make VLC work for more than six billion downloads positions him to solve the latency problem that underpins remote‑device control.
Kyber’s headquarters are in Paris, with additional offices in San Francisco and Singapore. The geographic spread reflects the breadth of the opportunity: the same SDK that lets a technician push a software update to a remote device can also let an AI agent manage an entire drone fleet.
The company’s dual‑licence model keeps the core code freely available while allowing enterprises to purchase a commercial version that includes support and custom integration services. The open‑source foundation also aligns with the broader trend of deep‑tech firms leveraging community contributions to accelerate development.
As of now, Kyber has raised $5 million, has a team of 25 employees, and is operating in three key verticals. The next milestones for the company include scaling its infrastructure to support larger fleets, expanding its customer base in the defence and telecommunications sectors, and further refining its latency metrics.
The funding round comes at a time when global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year. With the rapid growth of autonomous systems, the need for reliable, low‑latency control infrastructure is expected to increase.
Kyber’s current status is that it has secured seed funding, has a commercial customer base, and is actively developing its product. The company has not yet announced a product launch date or a pricing strategy for its enterprise offering.
The startup’s future will be shaped by its ability to demonstrate consistent, sub‑10‑millisecond latency in production environments, to secure additional enterprise contracts, and to attract further investment as it moves beyond the seed stage.
