Two engineers left Apple to build a better camera than Apple's own. Now OpenAI has bought their startup for more than $300 million.
Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, the pair who built Portrait Mode at Apple — the blurred-background photo mode now on half the iPhones in the world. Over six years the Los Altos company raised only about $30 million and stayed mostly under the radar. It doesn't do filters or after-the-fact editing; its neural networks learn the quirks of a specific camera system and fix the image the instant the shutter clicks.
Neither OpenAI nor Glass Imaging confirmed the deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on September 14. But it fits a pattern that's been building for a year. In 2025 OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for designer Jony Ive's studio, io Products, and has since been assembling a team for its own hardware line — reportedly a phone, earbuds, and some kind of AI companion device meant to see and hear the world around its owner.
In that world, a camera isn't a side feature — it's part of the interface. A device that reads its surroundings through a lens needs speed and image quality just as much as it needs a smart recognition model behind them. Buying a team that already cracked that problem at Apple is faster than building it in-house.
The catch: more than a year after buying io, OpenAI still hasn't shipped a single device, and it keeps writing nine-figure checks for hardware talent on top of its enormous compute bills. Whether any of this adds up to a product people actually want is a separate question — one that won't get answered until something ships.
