Twenty years in optics and image processing. Two startups. One that Apple bought, and one that is trying to pull professional-grade pictures out of the smallest cameras on earth.
Ziv Attar has spent his career on a stubbornly hard question: how do you get a great photograph out of a camera that keeps getting smaller? It is a question of physics before it is a question of software. Light behaves the way it behaves. Lenses distort. Sensors add noise. And the phone in your pocket has to compete, somehow, with a camera bag full of glass that weighs more than the phone itself.
Attar studied optical engineering at the Technion, Israel's institute of technology, graduating in the early 2000s. Optics is an unusual foundation for a software founder. It is a discipline of tradeoffs, where every design choice about a lens ripples into aberrations, light collection, and the shape of the blur behind a subject. That grounding would show up in everything he built afterward.
In 2011 he founded LinX Imaging and ran it as CEO. LinX worked on multi-camera systems for mobile devices at a time when most phones still shipped a single lens. The company built one of the first stereo-based portrait effects using dual cameras, and a mobile dual-camera system that fused a monochrome image with a color image to boost low-light performance. Both ideas became standard features on phones people carry today. In 2015 Apple acquired LinX.
Inside Apple, Attar led computational photography projects, including the Portrait Mode that launched with the iPhone 7 Plus. It is the feature that softly blurs the background behind a face, and it turned a hardware limitation into something people actually wanted. The effect his teams pioneered has since been imitated across the industry.
He left with a clear read on the problem. Phone makers spend months hand-tuning each camera. The results are good, but the process is slow, and there is a ceiling. Attar came away convinced that the next leap would not come from a bigger lens or a slightly better sensor. It would come from rethinking the whole pipeline, optics and AI together, designed as one system.
"GlassAI can unlock the full potential of all cameras to deliver stunning ultra-detailed results and razor sharp imagery."
Attar co-founded Glass Imaging in 2021 with Dr. Tom Bishop, a fellow former Apple engineer who had also worked on the Portrait Mode technology. Their product, GlassAI, is a neural image signal processor. It takes raw burst data straight off a sensor and rebuilds a sharp, clean image, correcting optical aberrations and sensor imperfections along the way.
The distinction Attar draws is important, and it is a philosophy as much as a technical claim. A lot of camera AI uses generative super-resolution: it guesses at detail and paints it in. That produces artifacts, and sometimes it invents things that were never there. GlassAI does the opposite. It recovers information already embedded in the raw data, so there are no hallucinations. The starting idea came from custom anamorphic lens designs, then generalized into a method that Attar says works on any camera.
Glass Imaging's cap table reads like a who's who of deep-tech investors. The $20M Series A was led by Insight Partners, with GV, Future Ventures and Abstract Ventures joining. LDV Capital led the earliest seed.
Series A led by Insight Partners, May 2025.
GV (Google Ventures) led the $9.3M extended seed.
Future Ventures and Abstract Ventures also participated.
LDV Capital led the original $2.2M seed round.
"By rethinking the optical system from the ground up to be tailor-made for smartphones, we managed to fit huge CMOS sensors that collect around 9x more light than traditional designs."
"I think it's fair to assume that if Apple hasn't managed to get decent results, it is a hard problem to solve."
"We have a very unique way of doing it, which was developed for the anamorphic lens systems and is efficient at any camera."
"The time it takes us to train shippable software from the time we put our hands on a new type of device varies between few hours to few days."
The Portrait Mode blur on hundreds of millions of iPhones traces back to technology Attar's teams pioneered.
LinX built the first mobile dual-camera system fusing a monochrome and a color image to boost low-light shots.
Glass Imaging's optical redesign lets phone cameras collect roughly 9x more light than conventional designs.
GlassAI targets not just phones but drones, wearables and other small camera platforms.