Kyber: The VLC Creator's $5M Startup Building a Real-Time 'Nervous System' for Robots and Drones

Target Use Cases

Kyber's technology applies across several high-stakes domains:

• Robotics: Teleoperation and fleet management of warehouse, factory, or field robots with near-zero lag.
• Drones: Real-time video feed and control for inspection, delivery, or surveillance drones.
• Remote Vehicle Control: Driving or piloting vehicles from a distance, such as autonomous vehicle backup centers.
• AI Visual Agents and Immersive Environments: Low-latency video and sensor streams for AI systems that need to see and act in real time, including VR/AR and embodied AI.

Funding and Investors

Kyber's seed round details are straightforward:

• Amount: $5 million (approximately €4.3 million).
• Lead investor: Lightspeed Venture Partners.
• Co-investors: OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures.
• Legal advisor: Morgan Lewis advised Lightspeed on the deal.

Lightspeed's bet on Kyber is notable: the same firm has backed prominent AI companies like Anthropic and Mistral AI.

The Team and Why Kempf Is the Right Person

Kempf is the lead developer of VLC (over 6 billion downloads) and the primary architect of FFmpeg, one of the world's most widely used video-processing libraries. Both projects are renowned for handling complex, latency-sensitive media streams at massive scale on minimal hardware. Kyber applies the same engineering philosophy — open-source, efficient, multi-platform — to the physical world.

The company currently has 25 employees across offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore.

The Bigger Picture: Physical AI

Kyber positions itself at the center of what it calls the "Physical AI era" — a future where hundreds of millions of robots and drones operate on streets, in warehouses, and in the air, all requiring real-time human or AI oversight. Kempf has described Kyber as the infrastructure layer that will make this vision practical by providing an end-to-end software stack for server, client, and protocol, so developers can focus on their drones, robots, or immersive worlds without worrying about latency, synchronization, security, or networking.