Kyber

Who owns Kyber?

Kyber is currently owned by OVNI Capital through OVNI Ventures I (2022 vintage), since 2025.

Hand-verified · updated 2026-05-13

About Kyber

Kyber is a Paris-based software company building infrastructure for controlling remote machines in real time, for use cases where the operator, the compute and the physical action are in three different places. Its core product is a software development kit, built on top of the open-source FFmpeg and VLC projects, that synchronises video, audio, sensor data and control inputs at very low latency, with a demonstrated 8 milliseconds of glass-to-glass latency shown at the Mile High Video conference in February 2025. The company targets robotics, drones, remote vehicles, cloud rendering and remote IT access, and ships both an open-source core and a productised enterprise version. It positions itself in the emerging physical AI segment as a control and streaming layer for connected machines. According to press disclosures, Kyber employs about 25 people, with headquarters in Paris and offices in San Francisco and Singapore, and is in commercial deployment with customers across defence, telecoms, robotics and AI.

Ownership journey

Kyber was founded by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the French open-source developer best known as the lead engineer behind the VLC media player, who began the project as a side effort drawing on two decades of work on FFmpeg and VLC. In June 2026 the company disclosed a USD 5 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with early-stage venture firm OVNI Capital, investing through its OVNI Ventures I fund, and Kima Ventures also participating. OVNI Capital is a minority venture backer rather than an owner, and Kyber remains founder-led with no controlling financial sponsor. No exit or secondary transaction has been recorded, and the company is still an active, privately held business.

Under PE ownership

The seed capital is intended to scale Kyber from a low-latency streaming demonstration into commercial control infrastructure for the machine economy, extending its technology from video delivery into synchronised device control. Since raising, the company has built out a team of roughly 25 staff, including a substantial cohort of forward-deployed engineers who embed with customers, and has opened offices in San Francisco and Singapore alongside its Paris base. It has moved into paid deployments with customers across defence, telecoms, robotics and AI, applying the same latency engineering that made VLC and FFmpeg ubiquitous to the real-time operation of robots and drones. The investment reflects a bet that physical AI systems will require a dedicated, low-latency control and streaming layer, and that Kyber can become that connective tissue.