OpenAI Group PBC has apparently bought smartphone camera software startup Glass Imaging Inc. for more than $300 million in a deal first reported today by The Wall Street Journal.
Neither company has confirmed the purchase publicly. The purchase lands in the middle of OpenAI’s push into consumer hardware. The company paid $6.5 billion in stock for Jony Ive’s io Products Inc. in May 2025, then spent the months after that hiring dozens of Apple employees. A screenless speaker priced at around $300 is among the devices reported to be in development.
Glass Imaging sells software called GlassAI, a neural image signal processor that runs raw sensor output through networks trained against a specific camera module. Ordinary camera pipelines treat demosaicing or color reconstruction, 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.
The company says the result is detail the sensor actually captured, not detail the model invented. Phones are the obvious market. Glass Imaging has pitched the same software at drones, wearables and other small cameras where the optics are too cramped to deliver a clean image on their own.
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 flaws. Tuning is therefore specific to each phone the software ships in.
Small pixels are where the company claims the widest margin. Shivansh Rao, who works on the Glass Imaging machine learning team, told PetaPixel that submicron 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.
Attar and Tom Bishop started the company in 2019 as chief executive and chief technology officer. Both came from Apple Inc., where they worked on the computational photography behind Portrait Mode. Attar joined Apple in 2015, when it acquired his Israeli camera startup LinX Imaging for about $20 million, according to Globes.
Glass Imaging had raised about $29 million before the sale. Insight Venture Management led its $20 million Series A round in May 2025, following a $9.3 million extended seed in 2024.
The deal is the latest in a run of purchases as OpenAI moves toward an initial public offering that reports have pushed to 2027. OpenAI bought the tech industry podcast company TBPN in April.
