OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300 million, report says
TechCrunch Amanda Silberling ● Covered by 3 sources
OpenAI reportedly bought Glass Imaging for more than $300 million. It’s a camera-AI play, and it hints OpenAI still wants its own devices.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has bought smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging in a deal worth more than $300 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. The startup is based in Los Altos, California, and was founded in 2019. It had raised about $30 million before this deal.
Glass Imaging was started by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who worked on the team behind Apple’s Portrait Mode. That background shows up in the product. The company uses AI to improve photos by learning how individual camera systems behave, instead of fixing an image only after it’s already been captured.
That approach matters because smartphone cameras are boxed in by physics. Glass Imaging is trying to get better results from the moment the shutter clicks, using neural networks tuned to specific camera setups across different phone models.
OpenAI didn’t immediately comment. But the move fits a pattern that’s already hard to miss: the company has been linked to hardware ambitions, including smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices. In 2025, Sam Altman and Jony Ive said they were working on a device startup called io, and OpenAI later bought Ive’s company for $6.5 billion.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
OpenAI keeps acting less like a chatbot company and more like a hardware company that just happens to have a chatbot. Buying camera talent is a classic move when the real goal is owning the whole device, not just the software layer. Silicon Valley loves calling that vertical integration; normal people just call it not wanting to share the good parts.
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