You have made your free video player work well. Now you do that 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 six billion times. But according to its lead developer, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, robots will soon be as ubiquitous as his open-source video software.

Convinced that “hundreds of millions of robots and drones” will be roaming the streets in a few years, this French entrepreneur and open source legend has been building Kyber, an infrastructure layer to control remote devices in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency.

This fits well with the rise of physical AI, and is part of why 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 underlying systems that use it,” the American VC firm wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing its investment.

The potential applications of Kyber go beyond AI, however. Kempf told TechCrunch that the platform is designed for “all use cases where the operator is not in the same place as the computer, not in the same place as the action.”

The remote control is only one part of the equation; speed is one – and it’s what inspired the launcher’s name, a nod to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars. “When you’re controlling things in the real world, every millisecond counts,” Kempf said.

Kyber’s approach to eliminating latency is firmly rooted in video streaming technology. The company started as a side project created by Kempf when the CTO started Shadow cloud gaming, and its early focus on streaming made VLC’s interface easy to draw. But IoT expertise is critical to optimization — optimizing the available computing performance of a device, at scale — another important part of what Kyber does.

Kempf says other companies that have the resources and the need are already building similar software for their own use cases, such as remote driving. But the biggest fleets today have about 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to control millions of them; that’s not the same.”

That jump in scale also raises issues with visibility – knowing that systems are actually working will be even more important when AI agents, not humans, are in charge of all ships and networks. Even on a much smaller scale, there is a real advantage: not needing to physically access the entire device to push a software update, for example.

That range — from a few devices to millions — means Kyber users will be using many more companies than will ever be paying customers. In keeping with Kempf’s roots, the main project is open source, while the company sells a manufactured version to business customers. And it’s not just software: like Palantir and others, Kyber also offers hands-on, custom deployments with front-end engineers, or FDEs.

FDEs make up the bulk of Kyber’s team, which currently has 25 full-time employees. It is headquartered in Paris but has offices in San Francisco and Singapore to support what it expects to be a global customer base across a variety of industries. The company says it has already been used for sales with clients in defense, telco, robotics, and AI.

To focus its efforts, Kyber has been prioritizing three areas: robots, drones of all kinds, and IT remote access, where the demand has been the strongest. On that last part, Kempf says Kyber wants to be more than a challenge to Citrix — but even that comparison alone points to a bigger market it can’t address.

Remote IT access isn’t exactly glamorous, but Kempf seems motivated by the problem — and Kyber’s jobs page shows why: “Companies that tried to solve it spent years and tens of millions building custom solutions that would never be shared. We’re building a version that everyone can use.”