OpenAI Reportedly Buys AI Camera Startup Glass Imaging for More Than $300 Million

Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 and is based in Los Altos, California. Its founders, Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, are former Apple engineers who worked on the computational photography behind Apple’s Portrait Mode. Attar joined Apple in 2015 when the company acquired his Israeli camera startup LinX Imaging for about $20 million, according to Globes. At Glass Imaging, Attar is chief executive and Bishop is chief technology officer.

The company sells GlassAI, a neural image signal processor that runs raw sensor output through networks trained against a specific camera module. Ordinary camera pipelines treat demosaicing, noise reduction, sharpening and frame fusion as separate stages. GlassAI handles them in a single pass and models the optical behavior of the individual lens. Glass Imaging says the result is detail the sensor actually captured, not detail the model invented.

Every module gets its own network. Glass Imaging measures the point spread function, sensor response and noise profile of one particular lens and sensor pairing, then builds a network around that exact set of characteristics. The company has pitched the software at phones, drones, wearables and other small cameras where the optics are too cramped to deliver a clean image on their own. Shivansh Rao, who works on the Glass Imaging machine learning team, told PetaPixel that sub-micron pixels encode fine detail in ways conventional processing cannot decode, and that in controlled tests the neural approach lifted a standard resolution measure by more than 50% as pixel size fell from 0.75 to 0.35 microns.

The software reached consumer handsets this year. Chinese smartphone maker Honor Device Co. Ltd. uses it for zoom on the 600 series, which carries a 200-megapixel main camera, and a raw video version has been demonstrated running on Qualcomm Inc. chipsets. Founder Ziv Attar told PetaPixel in June that Glass Imaging was proud to see the software shipping in a phone on sale.

Glass Imaging had raised about $29 million before the sale, according to SiliconANGLE. TechCrunch reported that the company had previously raised about $30 million. Insight Venture Management led its $20 million Series A round in May 2025, following a $9.3 million extended seed in 2024. The reported purchase price was first disclosed by The Wall Street Journal. TechCrunch described the deal as worth over $300 million, while SiliconANGLE reported it as more than $300 million. Neither company has confirmed the transaction publicly.

The purchase lands in the middle of OpenAI’s push into consumer hardware. OpenAI is rumored to be working on its own devices, including smartphones, earbuds and AI companion devices. In May 2025, OpenAI paid $6.5 billion in stock for Jony Ive’s io Products Inc., after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the Apple designer revealed they had been working together on the device startup. OpenAI has since hired dozens of Apple employees, and a screenless speaker priced at around $300 is among the devices reported to be in development. OpenAI also bought the technology-industry podcast company TBPN in April. The company is moving toward an initial public offering that reports have pushed to 2027.