VLC creator Jean-Baptiste Kempf has launched Kyber, an open-source SDK that leverages FFmpeg and QUIC to achieve an ultra-low 8-millisecond latency for robotics and autonomous vehicle control. The Paris-based startup raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners to scale remote operational infrastructure.
Kyber addresses the critical networking bottleneck in physical AI where traditional protocols like WebRTC cannot reliably meet the sub-10ms requirements of remote machine actuation. By repurposing high-efficiency video streaming logic for machine control, Kempf's team is decoupling compute from physical hardware, allowing AI models to operate robots from centralized servers without lag-induced failure. This creates a new B2B segment in the streaming stack: the 'control plane,' where video throughput is secondary to command-and-control synchronization. Watch for Kyber’s adoption in defense and warehouse robotics as a precursor to global enterprise deployments.
Kyber's $5 million seed round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the firm that previously backed Mistral AI's record-breaking seed round and has since invested in Anthropic, with additional participation from OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures. The company demonstrated 8 milliseconds of glass-to-glass latency at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025, a figure that represents the full pipeline from camera capture through encoding, transmission, decoding, and display. Kempf built Kyber as a side project while serving as CTO at Shadow, the French cloud gaming company, before spinning it out into a standalone venture with offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore.
Kyber operates on an open-core business model with its foundational code available under a dual licence, while selling productised enterprise versions and deploying forward-deployed engineers for custom integrations, a structure that mirrors Palantir's go-to-market approach. The 25-person team already has commercial deployments in defence, telco, robotics, and AI sectors, and Kempf has positioned the remote IT access segment as a potential challenger to Citrix, pointing to a large addressable market even before the robotics opportunity fully materialises. Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year, creating demand for the control and observability layer Kyber provides.
The technical foundation rests on QUIC rather than WebRTC, which was designed for video calls and typically introduces around 200 milliseconds of delay, far too slow for real-time machine actuation. Kyber synchronises video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs to a single clock, enabling operators and AI agents to manage fleets that Kempf estimates will scale from the current 2,000 to 3,000 remote-driven vehicles to potentially hundreds of millions of physical AI devices. The SDK is built directly on FFmpeg and VLC, the open-source projects Kempf has contributed to over two decades, with VLC having surpassed 6 billion downloads as confirmed at CES 2025.
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