Kyber, a French startup founded by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of the VLC player, has raised $5 million in funding, led by Lightspeed. The company aims to provide low-latency control infrastructure for robots, drones, and remote devices, entering the booming field of physical AI.
The core product is a real-time control SDK.
Kyber's core product is a software development kit (SDK) for synchronizing video, audio, sensor data, and control commands, with the goal of minimizing latency in remote operation scenarios. Kempf believes that the streets will see a large number of robots and drones in the coming years, and the stable operation of such systems depends on underlying transmission and control capabilities.
The company positions itself as an infrastructure provider for scenarios where "people, computing power, and execution are not in the same location." Besides robots and drones, this system can also be used for remote IT access and other scenarios. Kempf stated that in the real world, even millisecond-level latency can affect the experience and results when controlling devices.
Extending from video streaming technology to IoT devices
Kyber's technological approach stems from video streaming. This project originated as a side project initiated by Kempf when he was CTO of the cloud gaming company Shadow, making it easy for outsiders to connect it to VLC's background. However, the company emphasizes that the real challenge lies not only in transmitting video but also in optimizing performance for the computing power of different devices and maintaining stability under large-scale deployment.
Some well-resourced companies have previously built similar systems for purposes such as remote driving, but those solutions typically only serve a single business function. Kempf believes that if the scale of management expands from a few thousand devices to millions, the requirements for system design and maintenance will increase significantly.
It has entered the commercial deployment stage.
Kyber currently has a team of approximately 25 people, is headquartered in Paris, and has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. The company states that its products have already been commercially deployed in the defense, telecommunications, robotics, and AI sectors.
- This round of financing raised $5 million.
- Key areas include robotics, drones, and remote IT.
- Our clients cover industries such as defense, telecommunications, and AI.
Remote IT access is one of the most in-demand business areas. Kempf stated that the company aims to do more than just replace Citrix; it wants to transform capabilities that large enterprises have spent years and tens of millions of dollars building themselves into a universal product that more companies can use directly.
When announcing its investment, Lightspeed stated that the upper limit of physical AI capabilities largely depends on the reliability of the underlying system. For Kyber, this funding also demonstrates that the capital market is beginning to focus on the infrastructure layer behind the implementation of robots and AI, rather than just the models themselves.
