TL;DRVLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf raised $5M led by Lightspeed for Kyber, an open-source SDK that controls remote machines with ultra-low latency.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, has raised $5 million for his startup Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which also led Mistral AI’s record-breaking seed round and has since invested in Anthropic. OVNI Capital and Kima Ventures also participated.
Kyber’s core product is an SDK that synchronises video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with what the company claims is the lowest achievable latency. In a February 2025 demonstration at the Mile High Video conference, Kempf showed Kyber achieving 8 milliseconds of glass-to-glass latency, the time it takes for a video frame to be captured, encoded, transmitted, decoded, and displayed. The platform is built on top of FFmpeg and VLC, the open-source projects Kempf has spent two decades contributing to.
The connection to VLC is more than biographical. VLC has been downloaded more than 6 billion times, a figure confirmed at CES 2025, and the video-streaming expertise behind it is what gives Kyber its technical foundation. Kempf built the startup as a side project while serving as CTO at Shadow, the French cloud gaming company, before spinning it out.
