OpenAI Buys Camera Startup for $300M as Hardware Ambitions Heat Up

OpenAI agreed to acquire smartphone camera company Glass Imaging in a transaction valued at more than $300 million.

The deal adds a specialized imaging team as OpenAI explores its own brand of consumer devices, the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch reported.

Glass Imaging had raised roughly $30 million before the agreement. The company uses AI to overcome the physical limitations of smartphone cameras, training neural networks to understand the quirks of specific camera systems and improve image quality at capture rather than applying software tweaks afterward, with its technology accounting for differences across phone models and their multiple lenses.

The acquisition comes as OpenAI has been linked to potential hardware efforts spanning products such as smartphones and earbuds, potentially grabbing market share from Apple. After all, former Apple engineers Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop launched Glass Imaging. The duo previously worked on Apple’s Portrait Mode.

In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and designer Jony Ive disclosed they were collaborating on a device venture called io, around the time OpenAI bought Ive’s company for $6.5 billion.

IPO Plans On Hold

CEO Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI ruled out an initial public offering for 2026, citing unresolved safety concerns around rapidly advancing AI and the need to address alignment challenges facing the industry.

"Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that," he said. "I would say not 2026. We have a lot of work to do, including meeting the safety and alignment requirements of this moment and figuring out how the industry and governments can work together."

OpenAI is also not profitable and is operating at a steep multi-billion-dollar loss, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The delay follows a June New York Times report that OpenAI was weighing a potentially trillion-dollar listing, a decision complicated by volatility in Elon Musk’s SpaceX shares at the time.

OpenAI has also moved to shore up its own safety credentials, appointing alignment researcher Paul Christiano to the OpenAI Foundation Board and its Safety and Security Committee.

The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research company had previously been targeting a valuation of at least $1 trillion for its IPO, with a possible filing as early as the second half of 2026.

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