Kyber

Kyber is a Paris-headquartered infrastructure company building a protocol layer that connects human operators and AI agents to physical machines in real time. Its core software is an SDK that synchronizes video, audio, sensor data and control inputs with minimal latency across distributed locations, targeting cases where the operator, the compute and the physical action are in three different places. The company frames its work as the underlying layer for "physical AI," addressing latency, synchronization and observability for fleets ranging from a handful of devices to, in the company's stated ambition, millions.

The technical approach draws on video-streaming techniques combined with IoT optimization, tuning performance to the compute available on each device at scale. Beyond real-time control, the platform is positioned to support fleet observability and remote software updates without physically reaching each device. Kyber prioritizes three segments: robotics, drones of all types, and remote IT access, where it reports particularly strong demand and positions itself against incumbents such as Citrix. As of June 2026 the company said it was already in commercial deployment with customers in defense, telco, robotics and AI.

Founding story

Kyber was founded by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, an open source video player that has been downloaded more than 6 billion times. The project began as a side project Kempf built while he was CTO of the cloud gaming startup Shadow, growing out of his streaming and low-latency work. Kempf's thesis is that hundreds of millions of robots and drones will operate in public spaces within a few years and will need a shared real-time control layer. The name is a reference to the kyber crystals used in Star Wars lightsabers, chosen to signal the company's focus on speed, since "every millisecond matters" when controlling physical objects.

Business model

Kyber follows an open core model: the core project is open source and freely usable, while the company sells a productized version to enterprise customers. It also provides hands-on custom deployment via forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), an approach compared to Palantir's; FDEs make up a large share of its 25-person team. The company expects its open source user base to be far larger than its paying customer base.

Revenue comes from a commercial, productized enterprise edition of the open source core, supplemented by hands-on deployment work delivered by forward-deployed engineers.

Traction

As of June 2026 the company reported 25 full-time employees and existing commercial deployments with customers across defense, telco, robotics and AI, alongside a $5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Latest developments

In June 2026 Kyber announced a $5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, to be used to scale its productized enterprise offering and continue development of the protocol layer for real-time control of physical AI fleets.