LOS ALTOS, California โ OpenAI has reportedly acquired Glass Imaging, an artificial intelligence imaging company co-founded by Israeli entrepreneur and former Apple engineer Ziv Attar, in a deal valuing the start-up at more than US$300 million.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the acquisition, citing people familiar with the transaction. Neither OpenAI nor Glass Imaging had publicly announced the deal as of September 15.
The acquisition gives OpenAI a team specializing in computational photography and neural image processing as the artificial intelligence company pursues a broader move into consumer hardware.
Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 by Attar and Tom Bishop, both former Apple engineers who worked on camera technology associated with the iPhone’s Portrait Mode.
For Attar, the transaction represents another major exit in a career connecting Israeli optical engineering with Silicon Valley.
Born and raised in Afula, Israel, Attar studied optical engineering at the Technion before working as a senior optics specialist at Rafael. He later founded camera technology companies before joining Apple after its 2015 acquisition of Israeli camera start-up LinX Imaging.
Using AI To Overcome The Limits Of Small Cameras
Glass Imaging was created around a fundamental problem in modern consumer photography.
Smartphones, drones, wearables and other compact devices have strict physical limitations on the size of the lenses and sensors they can accommodate. Glass Imaging sought to compensate for those constraints through artificial intelligence rather than relying exclusively on increasingly complex camera hardware.
Its core technology, GlassAI, uses camera-specific neural networks to process raw sensor information and correct optical aberrations, sensor imperfections, and noise. The system is designed to recover more detail from the information the camera actually captures.
That distinction is important.
Rather than functioning primarily as a generative AI system that creates new visual details after an image has been captured, Glass Imaging says its technology works with raw camera information to recover real image content and improve what the physical camera system recorded.
GlassAI has been developed for smartphones, drones and wearable devices, giving the technology potential applications well beyond conventional mobile photography.
The company’s technology has already reached consumer devices. GlassAI technology has been used for zoom imaging in Honor smartphones, while Glass Imaging announced in January that its raw-video neural image signal processing pipeline was production-ready on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform.
From Israeli Optical Engineer To Apple
Attar’s background adds a significant Israeli technology connection to the acquisition.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in optical engineering from the Technion in 2002 and subsequently worked at Rafael before entering the start-up sector.
Attar later co-founded LinX Imaging, an Israeli computational photography company Apple acquired in 2015 for a reported US$20 million. He subsequently worked at Apple on camera technology before establishing Glass Imaging with Bishop.
Attar and Bishop brought that experience to Glass Imaging, where they pursued a different approach to the limitations facing increasingly compact cameras.
The company had raised approximately US$30 million before its acquisition, including backing from investors such as GV and Insight Partners. Glass Imaging was valued at approximately US$100 million during a 2025 funding round, meaning the reported OpenAI transaction values it at more than three times that figure.
A Potential Piece Of OpenAI’s Hardware Strategy
OpenAI has not disclosed what it intends to do with Glass Imaging.
That unanswered question matters because OpenAI is also pursuing consumer hardware with former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
OpenAI acquired Ive’s hardware company io in 2025 for about US$6.5 billion, bringing Ive and his design operation into a major collaboration focused on developing a new generation of AI devices.
The Glass Imaging acquisition gives OpenAI access to engineers and technology specializing in extracting higher-quality visual information from small cameras, an obvious area of potential relevance for devices designed to interact with the physical world.
However, no public confirmation indicates that GlassAI will be incorporated into an OpenAI consumer device.
Any connection between the acquisition and a specific forthcoming OpenAI product therefore remains speculative.
What is established is that OpenAI has reportedly spent more than US$300 million to acquire a company whose central expertise lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cameras and compact consumer hardware.
For Israel’s technology sector, the transaction also represents another significant international acquisition involving an Israeli-founded imaging company.
Attar’s career has now connected Israeli optical engineering, Apple’s computational photography efforts and the emerging generation of AI imaging technology.
With OpenAI increasingly looking beyond software and toward physical AI products, the technology developed by Glass Imaging could give the company another building block for devices designed not only to process information, but also to see the world around them.
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