OpenAI has acquired Glass Imaging, a startup that uses AI to improve smartphone camera image quality, in a deal worth over $300 million, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal1,2.
Glass Imaging, founded in 2019 and based in Los Altos, California, had previously raised about $30 million in funding. The company was founded by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, a pair of former Apple engineers who previously led the team that developed Apple's Portrait Mode3.
Rather than applying AI to edit photos after capture, Glass Imaging uses neural networks to learn about individual camera systems, including the different cameras on various smartphone models, to produce better images from the moment the shutter clicks. The technology is designed to overcome the physical size constraints of compact cameras and has been developed for smartphones, drones, and wearables.
The acquisition fits into a broader set of hardware moves by OpenAI. The company is rumored to be working on its own devices, including smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices. In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive revealed they had been working together on a device startup called io, and OpenAI bought Ive's company for $6.5 billion.
ANALYSIS The Glass Imaging deal, at over $300 million, is a fraction of the $6.5 billion OpenAI paid for Ive's io, but it adds a specific technical capability: on-device camera processing built by engineers with direct experience shipping Apple's Portrait Mode. Pairing computational photography expertise with whatever hardware OpenAI is developing could give the company a differentiated camera stack rather than relying on off-the-shelf imaging pipelines.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the acquisition. Calcalistech described the deal as a "quiet" acquisition of the Israeli-founded startup.