Two former Apple engineers who built Portrait Mode have sold their startup to OpenAI.
The company is Glass Imaging, based in Los Altos and founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop. The Wall Street Journal put the price above $300M. The pair had raised roughly $30M to that point. OpenAI has not commented.
Their approach differs from the usual photo cleanup. Rather than repairing an image after capture, Glass Imaging trains neural networks to model how a specific lens and sensor bend light. Knowing that, a phone can compensate while the shot is taken, which buys quality back from the physical limits of a slim camera module.
That skill set fits a hardware effort OpenAI has hinted at for over a year, covering phones, earbuds and companion devices. In 2025 it bought io, the device venture from designer Jony Ive, for $6.5B.
Cameras are the feature phone makers compete on hardest, so a team that improves them in software travels well to almost any device. Neither side has said what the group will build next.
A price like this for a small team is usually about capability rather than a product line. Buying a camera pipeline outright is faster than assembling one, and it keeps the work inside the company as OpenAI moves toward shipping something you hold in your hand.
