OpenAI acquires Glass Imaging for over $300 million to build its own camera

OpenAI has closed a deal to acquire Glass Imaging for more than $300 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Los Altos startup, founded in 2019, had raised roughly $30 million to date. Its technology targets image quality at the moment of capture, not in post-processing.

Glass Imaging was founded by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, former Apple engineers who led development of Portrait Mode. Their approach diverges from most mobile computational photography. Instead of running neural networks on the finished image, the system learns the specific optical characteristics of each camera stack — sensors, lenses, filters — and applies correction at the sensor readout stage. That lets it extract more detail and dynamic range from the physical constraints of a phone camera module.

The acquisition fits a broader hardware push at OpenAI. In 2025 it emerged that Sam Altman and Jony Ive had been collaborating on a device startup called io, and OpenAI acquired Ive's company for $6.5 billion. Rumors have also circulated about phones, headphones and dedicated "AI companion" devices. Glass Imaging supplies the missing computational-optics layer.

OpenAI has not commented on the report. The open question is whether the technology will remain an internal component of future OpenAI devices or be licensed to existing phone makers — a model Glass Imaging itself was exploring before the acquisition. Either way, the move signals that OpenAI treats hardware not as a side experiment but as a core product strategy.