OpenAI buys iPhone architect’s startup for $6.4bn

OpenAI is buying an untested startup for $6.4bn, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, known best as one of the principal architects of the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post that their partnership has been two years in the making.

“A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition,” they wrote in the blog post, which offered scant details on upcoming devices. “Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs.”

OpenAI’s purchase of io is its biggest known acquisition yet. Ive and a cohort of other Apple alumni founded io one year ago, according to the blog post. It is part of Ive’s bigger project called LoveFrom, which describes itself as a “creative collective” made up of architects, artists, engineers, various types of designers, musicians and writers.

Ive left Apple in 2019 after a 27-year career as one of the company’s foremost product designers. He’s known for simple and clean aesthetics that pay attention to small details like packaging and font. One of his early famous designs was the brightly colored bubble-shaped iMac computer. From there, he went on to design the first iPod, iPhone, Macbook Air, Apple Watch and AirPods.

For his work on creating such distinctive products, Ive was knighted by Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace in 2012, a moment he called “thrilling” and “particularly humbling”.

In Altman and Ive’s blog post on Wednesday, they wrote that the io team will merge with OpenAI to work “more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco”. Ive himself will not join OpenAI as an employee, but his company will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” according to Bloomberg.

Since leaving Apple and starting LoveFrom, Ive has mostly remained quiet, and io has not debuted any hardware. His company’s list of clients reportedly includes Christie’s, Airbnb and Ferrari, though. Another project Ive has been working on is LoveFrom’s headquarters in San Francisco, according to the New York Times. Ives told the paper he is designing the headquarters of the company he is developing with OpenAI.

OpenAI has likewise yet to unveil a hardware device, but it has indicated it is heading in that direction. It has hired hardware and robotics staff, including Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski who headed Meta’s augmented reality glasses initiative. In her LinkedIn announcement, Kalinowski wrote that her new role at OpenAI is to focus on “robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world”. OpenAI has also invested in the robot startup Physical Intelligence, which aims to bring “general-purpose AI into the physical world”.

Investors have been throwing money at OpenAi over the past couple of years, which is now valued at $300bn, according to Bloomberg. In March, it closed a funding round of $40bn led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Microsoft has a 49% stake in the AI company after investing $13bn in 2023.

Along with io, OpenAI moved to make other mammoth acquisitions over the last year. It purchased the AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf for $3bn earlier this month and bought the real-time analytics database Rockset for an undisclosed sum last summer.