Kyber, a French start-up company created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the main developer of the VLC player, completed a $5 million financing, which was led by Lightseed. The company hopes to provide a low-delayed control infrastructure for robots, drones and remote equipment, cutting into the rising physical AI track.
Core product is real time control SDK
The core product of Kyber is a software development toolkit for synchronizing video, audio, sensor data and control instructions, with the goal of minimizing delays in remote operating scenarios. Kempf believes that there will be a large number of robots and drones in the streets in the coming years, and that the stable operation of such systems depends on the ability to transmit and control at the bottom.
The company has positioned itself as an infrastructure provider in the context of “man, man, man, execution at the same location”. Besides robots and drones, the system can be used for remote IT access and so on. Kempf indicates that the msisecond delay affects both the experience and the results when controlling the device in the real world.
From video stream technology to material networking equipment
Kyber's technical thinking comes from video streaming. The project was originally a side project initiated by Kempf during his assignment to CTO with Shadow, a cloud game company, so it can easily be linked to the background of the VLC. The company stressed, however, that the real challenge was not just to transmit video, but also to optimize performance for different equipment and to maintain stability in large-scale deployment.
Some well-resourced enterprises have previously built their own similar systems for purposes such as long-distance driving, but such programmes usually serve only a single business. According to Kempf, there would be a marked increase in system design and operational requirements if the scale of management were expanded from thousands of equipment to millions.
Commercial deployment is in progress
Kyber currently has a team of about 25, based in Paris, with offices in San Francisco and Singapore. According to the company, the products have entered commercial deployment in the fields of defence, telecommunications, robotics and AI.
- This round of financing amounts to $5 million
- Focus areas include robots, drones, remote IT
- Clients cover defense, telecommunications, AI etc.
Among them, remote IT access is one of the more demanding operations. Kempf states that what the company wants to do is not just an alternative to Citrix, but rather to make more generic products that could be used directly by large firms, which used to be home-grown for many years and tens of millions of dollars.
In announcing the investment, Lightspeed stated that the physical AI capacity ceiling depended largely on the reliability of the bottom system. For Kyber, it also shows that capital markets are beginning to focus on the infrastructure layers behind robots and AI, not just the models themselves.