{"id":734453,"date":"2026-06-20T06:05:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T03:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/he-made-your-free-video-player-run-smoothly-now-hes-doing-that-for-robots\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T06:05:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T03:05:24","slug":"he-made-your-free-video-player-run-smoothly-now-hes-doing-that-for-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/he-made-your-free-video-player-run-smoothly-now-hes-doing-that-for-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"He made your free video player run smoothly. Now he’s doing that for robots."},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019ve probably used VLC Media<\/a> Player, the free video player with the orange traffic-cone icon \u2014 it\u2019s been download<\/a>ed more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open source video software.<\/p>\n

Convinced that \u201chundreds of millions of robots and drones\u201d will be roaming the streets in a few years, this French serial entrepreneur and open-source legend has been building Kyber<\/a>, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.<\/p>\n

This lines up well with the rise of physical AI, and it\u2019s part of why the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, which has also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. \u201cPhysical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it,\u201d the American VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post<\/a> announcing its investment.<\/p>\n

Kyber\u2019s potential applications go well beyond AI, though. Kempf told TechCrunch the platform is built for \u201call the use cases where the person who\u2019s operating is not in the same place as the compute, which is not in the same place as the action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remote control is one half of the equation; speed is the other \u2014 and it\u2019s what inspired the startup\u2019s name, a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. \u201cIf you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,\u201d Kempf said.<\/p>\n

Kyber\u2019s approach to eliminating lag is rooted firmly in video-streaming technology<\/a>. The company started as a side project Kempf built while CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its early focus on streaming makes the VLC connection an easy one to draw. But IoT expertise matters just as much for optimization \u2014 tuning performance to a device\u2019s available compute, at scale \u2014 the other core piece of what Kyber does.<\/p>\n

Kempf says other companies with the resources and the need have already built similar software for their own use cases, like remote driving. \u201cBut the largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that\u2019s not the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

That jump in scale also raises the stakes on observability \u2014 knowing systems are actually working will matter even more when AI agents, not people, are managing entire fleets and networks. Even at much smaller scale, though, there\u2019s a real benefit: not needing to physically reach every device just to push a software update, for example.<\/p>\n

That range \u2014 from a handful of devices to millions \u2014 means Kyber\u2019s user base will likely span far more companies than will ever become paying customers. True to Kempf\u2019s roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a productized version to enterprise customers. And it\u2019s not just software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers hands-on, custom deployment through forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs.<\/p>\n

FDEs make up a large part of Kyber\u2019s team, which currently numbers 25 full-time staffers. The startup is headquartered in Paris but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects will be a global client base across a variety of industries. The company says it is already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics, and AI.<\/p>\n

To focus its efforts, Kyber has been prioritizing three segments: robotics, drones of every kind, and remote IT access, where demand has been particularly strong. In that last segment, Kempf says Kyber aspires to be more than just a Citrix challenger \u2014 but even that comparison alone points to a sizable total addressable market.<\/p>\n

Remote IT access isn\u2019t exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems energized by the problem \u2014 and Kyber\u2019s careers page<\/a> hints at why: \u201cThe companies that tried to solve it spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions they\u2019ll never share. We\u2019re building the version everyone else can use.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You\u2019ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic-cone icon \u2014 it\u2019s been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as his open source video software. Convinced that \u201chundreds of millions of robots and drones\u201d will…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":734454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-2182705840.jpeg?resize=1200,800","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[28340,32232,79290,162898,161997,158134,70917,162899],"class_list":["post-734453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-europe","tag-france","tag-iot","tag-kyber","tag-open-source-software","tag-physical-ai","tag-startups","tag-vlc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/734454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}