OpenAI buys smartphone-camera AI startup Glass Imaging for over $300 million

OpenAI has acquired Glass Imaging, a Los Altos-based computational-photography startup, in a deal worth more than $300 million, according to a Wall Street Journal report cited by both TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE. Neither company has publicly confirmed the purchase (TechCrunch notes "OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment"), but the price and structure are consistent across both outlets' reporting.

Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone's Portrait Mode, founded Glass Imaging in 2019. Attar joined Apple in 2015 when it acquired his earlier startup, LinX Imaging, for roughly $20 million. Glass Imaging's product, GlassAI, is a neural image signal processor that runs raw camera-sensor output through networks trained on the physical characteristics of specific camera modules. It handles demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening and frame fusion in a single pass, replacing traditional post-processing. The technology already ships in Honor's 600-series phones.

A cheap bet next to OpenAI's other hardware moves

The company had raised only about $29 million before the acquisition: a $9.3 million extended seed in 2024 and a $20 million Series A led by Insight Venture Management in May 2025 that valued it at $100 million. A $300 million sale is roughly 3x that valuation, modest next to OpenAI's $6.5 billion purchase of Jony Ive's io Products in 2025. It fits the same pattern of OpenAI buying specific hardware capabilities (industrial design with io, camera imaging with Glass Imaging) as it works toward its still-unannounced consumer device.