It has made your free video player work smoothly. Now he’s doing it for robots.

You’ve probably used VLC Media Player, the free video player with the orange traffic cone icon — it’s been downloaded more than 6 billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, bots will soon be almost as ubiquitous as open source video software.

Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” would be roaming the streets within a few years, the French serial entrepreneur and open source legend built Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling devices remotely in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.

This aligns well with the rise of physical AI, and is part of the reason the Paris-based startup was able to raise a $5 million round led by Lightspeed, which also backed Anthropic and Mistral AI. “Physical AI is only as good as the platforms that run it,” the US venture capital firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing its investment.

However, Kuiper’s potential applications extend beyond artificial intelligence. The platform is designed for “all use cases where the person doing the work is not in the same place as the computing, and they’re not in the same place as the action,” Kempf told TechCrunch.

The remote control is half the equation; Speed ​​is also what inspired the startup’s name, a reference to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. “If you control things in the real world, every millisecond matters,” Kempf said.

Kyber’s approach to eliminating lag is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company began as a side project created by Kempf when he was CTO at cloud gaming startup Shadow, and its early focus on streaming makes VLC connectivity easy. But IoT expertise is just as important for optimization — fine-tuning performance on a device’s available compute, at scale — which is the other core part of what Kyber does.

Other companies with the resources and need have already built similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving, Kempf says. “But the largest fleets today may have 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine having to manage millions of them; that’s not the same thing.”

This jump in scale also raises the risks of observability – knowing that systems actually work will matter even more when AI agents, not people, manage entire fleets and networks. However, even on a much smaller scale, there is a real benefit: not having to physically access each device just to push a software update, for example.

This scale – from a few devices to millions – means that Kyber’s user base will likely include many more businesses than will ever become paying customers. True to Kempf’s roots, the core project is open source, while the company sells a production version to enterprise customers. And it’s not just software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers hands-on, ad hoc deployment through forward deployed engineers, or FDEs.

FDEs make up a large part of the Kyber team, which currently includes 25 full-time employees. The startup is headquartered in Paris but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects to be a global client base across a variety of industries. The company says it has already begun commercial deployment with customers in defence, communications, robotics and artificial intelligence.

To focus its efforts, Kuiper prioritized three sectors: robotics, drones of every type, and remote information technology access, where demand was particularly strong. In this last part, Kempf says Kyber aspires to be more than just a competitor to Citrix – but even that comparison alone suggests a large overall addressable market.

Remote IT access isn’t exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems passionate about the problem — and Kuiper’s careers page notes why: “Companies that have tried to solve the problem have spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions they’ll never share. We’re building the version that everyone else can use.”