Kyber raises $5M led by Lightspeed to control robots and drones in real time

What's the deal? Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer behind VLCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Media Player, has raised $5 million for KyberDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, his Paris-based startup building infrastructure to control remote devices in real time.

The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also backed AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Mistral AI.

Kyber's core product is an SDK that synchronises video, audio, sensor data, and control inputs with minimal latency. Its name nods to the lightsaber crystals in Star Wars.

Why now? Kempf believes "hundreds of millions of robots and drones" will roam streets within a few years, a bet aligned with the rise of physical AI.

"Physical AI is only as good as the underlying systems running it," Lightspeed wrote in a post announcing the investment.

The platform targets any case "where the person who's operating is not in the same place as the compute, which is not in the same place as the action," Kempf told TechCrunch.

What could go wrong? Scale is the hardest part. "The largest fleets today have maybe 2,000 or 3,000 vehicles. Imagine you need to manage millions of them; that's not the same thing," Kempf said.

Managing fleets at that size also raises the stakes on observability, especially as AI agents — not people — take over.

Kyber's core software is open source, with a productised version sold to enterprise customers. That model means its user base will likely far outnumber its paying clients.

The signal: By backing an early-stage infrastructure play with the same firm behind Anthropic and Mistral AI, Lightspeed is doubling down on the physical AI thesis — betting that the software layer connecting operators, compute, and machines will matter as much as the models themselves.