❯ OpenAI buys phone-camera company Glass Imaging for more than $300M, founders came from Apple’s Portrait Mode team

Deal landsOpenAI has acquired phone-camera company Glass Imaging in a deal valuing it above $300 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Founded in 2019 and based in Los Altos, California, it had raised about $30 million and was valued near $100 million last year.

What it sellsFounders Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop are former Apple engineers who led the team behind Apple’s Portrait Mode. Rather than editing a photo afterwards, its neural networks learn the physics of each camera system so a better raw signal is captured the moment the shutter fires. The company raised a $20 million Series A in May 2025.

One more lineFor OpenAI’s hardware program, camera capability arrives early, leaving volume timing and manufacturing as the open questions; for module and sensor suppliers in the phone imaging chain, once image quality becomes a licensable software layer, pricing power loosens first in the telephoto and low-light tiers that algorithms already carry.

▪ SIGNALAs camera quality migrates from hardware specs to software, module suppliers get repriced first.