Hustler Words – From enabling billions to seamlessly enjoy digital media, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the visionary behind the ubiquitous VLC Media Player, is now setting his sights on an even more ambitious frontier: orchestrating the real-time control of a future teeming with autonomous machines. His latest endeavor, Kyber, emerges as a critical infrastructure layer designed to eliminate latency in remote operations, promising to be as foundational for robotics as VLC has been for video playback.
Kempf, a French serial entrepreneur and open-source luminary, foresees a world where "hundreds of millions of robots and drones" navigate our streets and skies within years. This conviction fueled the creation of Kyber, a platform engineered to synchronize video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with unparalleled speed. Its core offering is an SDK that bridges the geographical gap between operator, computational power, and the physical action, making every millisecond count – a principle so vital it inspired the company’s name, a nod to the powerful Kyber crystals from Star Wars.
The rise of physical AI underscores the urgency and relevance of Kyber’s mission. Leading venture capital firm Lightspeed, an early backer of AI giants like Anthropic and Mistral AI, recognized this potential, spearheading a $5 million funding round for the Paris-based startup. As Lightspeed articulated in its investment announcement, "Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it," highlighting Kyber’s role as a foundational technology.
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Kyber’s innovative approach to combating lag is deeply rooted in Kempf’s extensive experience with video-streaming technology. Originating as a side project during his tenure as CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, the platform naturally leverages advanced streaming techniques. However, its capabilities extend beyond mere data transmission, incorporating crucial IoT expertise to optimize performance across diverse devices and at immense scale – a challenge far greater than managing a few thousand units.
While some large organizations have developed proprietary, custom solutions for remote control, these are typically confined to smaller fleets. Kempf emphasizes that scaling to "millions of them" presents an entirely different magnitude of complexity. Kyber aims to democratize this capability, providing a robust, universal solution for managing vast networks of intelligent agents, whether human-operated or AI-driven. This leap in scale also elevates the importance of observability, ensuring systems are functioning correctly, and simplifying crucial tasks like remote software updates without physical intervention.
True to its founder’s open-source ethos, Kyber offers its core project freely, while providing a productized, enterprise-grade version for commercial clients. Beyond software, the company distinguishes itself by offering hands-on, custom deployment services through its forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), mirroring strategies employed by companies like Palantir. With a team of 25 full-time staff spread across offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Singapore, Kyber is strategically positioned to serve a global clientele across sectors including defense, telecommunications, robotics, and AI, where it is already in commercial deployment.
Kyber is currently prioritizing three key segments: robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access. The demand in remote IT, in particular, has been significant, with Kempf envisioning Kyber as far more than just a challenger to existing solutions like Citrix. The company’s career page eloquently captures this ambition: "The companies that tried to solve it spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions they’ll never share. We’re building the version everyone else can use." This philosophy underscores Kyber’s commitment to creating a universally accessible and powerful infrastructure for the connected, autonomous future.
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