OpenAI buys former Apple’s engineers’ startup for over $300M as it builds AI devices
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu ● Covered by 3 sources
OpenAI bought camera startup Glass Imaging for more than $300 million. It’s another move toward AI devices, and this one adds camera know-how to the stack.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has bought Glass Imaging, a Los Altos startup that builds AI-powered smartphone camera tech, in a deal worth more than $300 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. That price is a sharp jump from the company’s roughly $100 million valuation last year, and far above the about $30 million it had raised before the sale.
Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who worked on the team behind Portrait Mode. Their software, GlassAI, doesn’t try to polish photos after the fact. It uses neural networks to learn the quirks of a given camera system and correct them as the shutter fires.
That matters because smartphone hardware hits a wall that software can only partly hide. Phones are too thin to carry the lenses and sensors that dedicated cameras use, so computational imaging becomes the workaround. The company’s technology is reportedly already used in phones made by Honor.
For OpenAI, this looks less like a random shopping spree and more like a hardware plan taking shape. The company paid $6.5 billion for Jony Ive’s io in May 2025, then $1.1 billion for Statsig later that year. It also has more than 200 people working across hardware projects that include a smart speaker, smart glasses and a smart lamp, with the first device, code-named Sweetpea, expected in the second half of 2026.
And there’s a reason camera tech fits. OpenAI has also been linked to an AI agent smartphone with Qualcomm, MediaTek and Luxshare. A device like that needs to understand what’s in front of it, and Glass Imaging gives OpenAI a piece it would otherwise have to build slowly or license from someone else.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what serious hardware ambition looks like: buy the boring, necessary parts before the demo stage turns into a faceplant. OpenAI is acting like a company that expects devices to matter, not just chat windows with better lighting. The real question isn’t whether it can assemble the stack; plenty of firms can buy parts. It’s whether it can stop making very expensive objects that people admire for about seven seconds.
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