The entrepreneur from Afula who changed the iPhone camera – and now sells his startup to OpenAI

Israeli entrepreneur Ziv Attar, a native of Afula, has sold his company Glass Imaging to OpenAI for $300 million. Attar previously led the development of the iPhone's portrait mode, first through LinX, which was acquired by Apple in 2015, and later as part of Apple's team. Now, with Glass Imaging, which he founded with Dr. Tom Bishop, he develops AI-based photography technology to improve image quality through customized hardware and neural networks.

Israeli entrepreneur Ziv Attar, a native of Afula and a graduate of the Technion, has sold his company Glass Imaging to OpenAI for $300 million. Attar is a key figure in the world of smartphone photography: in 2011, he founded LinX, which developed the first dual-camera system for mobile and a dual-camera-based portrait mode. Apple acquired LinX in 2015 for $25 million, and Attar joined Apple's camera algorithm team, leading the transformation of portrait mode into a widely commercial product, first launched on the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016. In 2019, Attar left Apple together with Dr. Tom Bishop and founded Glass Imaging, which develops AI-based photography technology. The company characterizes the optics and sensor of each camera in great detail and feeds the information into a neural network that can run on a smartphone and correct optical defects and sensor noise in real time. The acquisition may serve OpenAI in developing a new hardware product, led by designer Jony Ive, which is expected to require a high-quality camera for environmental analysis.