OpenAI buys smartphone-camera AI startup Glass Imaging for over $300 million
The Wall Street Journal reports OpenAI has quietly acquired Glass Imaging, a computational-photography startup founded by former Apple engineers, adding another piece to its Jony Ive-led hardware push.
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 independently by both TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE. Neither OpenAI nor Glass Imaging 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.
Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who worked on the iPhone's Portrait Mode; 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, handling demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening and frame fusion in a single pass rather than through traditional post-processing. The technology already ships in Honor's 600-series phones.
A cheap bet relative to OpenAI's other hardware moves
The company had raised only about $29 million total 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, a modest number next to OpenAI's $6.5 billion purchase of Jony Ive's io Products in 2025, but it slots into the same pattern: OpenAI buying specific hardware capabilities -- industrial design with io, now camera imaging with Glass Imaging -- rather than building them from scratch as it works toward its still-unannounced consumer device.