OpenAI invests $40 million in Opal Electronics, valuing it at $275 million.
OpenAI put $40 million — its Series B — into a company that already knew what a factory is.
Opal Electronics — formerly Opal Camera — sold more than 50,000 webcams before it pivoted to audio. That track record is the entire bet. While Humane burned through hundreds of millions to build a wearable that investors valued at $850 million before it collapsed roughly 14 months after shipping, and Rabbit shipped an AI device whose developers abandoned — according to TechCrunch — 95 percent of its users, Opal was learning how to manufacture at scale. The $40 million Series B, led by OpenAI with participation from Samsung, Peter Thiel, Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, and tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), values the company at roughly $275 million post-money, according to WIRED. The Information first reported OpenAI's investment in the company.
The pivot to audio did not come from a clean sheet. At the end of 2022, OpenAI showed the Opal team an early preview of ChatGPT — the product that would reshape the industry eighteen months before it shipped — and Opal decided it wanted to be on that side of the transition. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had already been an early Opal webcam customer, visiting the company's offices in 2022 to ask whether the Whisper speech transcription model could run locally on cameras for live subtitles. The relationship predates the investment by years.
The product itself is still mostly a blank. Pricing is undisclosed. Form factor is undisclosed. No hands-on access has been granted to reporters. WIRED and The Information report that current testers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, executives at xAI, Thinking Machines, and Anthropic — the same cohort of AI leaders who have spent years predicting that audio will be the next big interface, though relatively few ChatGPT users opt to use the voice interface, with most preferring text, per Ars Technica. OpenAI reorganized its own audio teams in early 2026 to overhaul voice model capabilities. The interest in a dedicated device suggests the prediction may finally have a shot at being right — or that the people building the underlying models have a structural interest in seeing it succeed.
The graveyard of AI-first hardware is instructive about why the odds are long. The Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 were both called "very poor products" by Jony Ive, the former Apple design chief whose own AI device startup Ive io merged with OpenAI in a $6.5 billion deal reported by The Verge in May 2025. OpenAI did not buy Ive io for its AI research — it bought the supply chain and industrial design expertise that no AI startup had managed to build in-house. That $6.5 billion is the most expensive public confirmation that the playbook is hardware-first, not software-first. Both companies tried to replace the smartphone. Opal, by contrast, already shipped something physical that people bought — a narrower ambition, but one the industry has proven it cannot consistently achieve. That contrast is the lesson the industry is now drawing: the difference between AI hardware failure and success is supply chain, not software. Start with hardware, not with AI.
Opal's webcam supply chain decisions around camera sensors and optics informed supplier relationships that apply broadly to consumer electronics, though audio components involve different technical tradeoffs and Opal has not disclosed its manufacturing partners. Whether Opal's production experience translates to audio AI hardware is an open question — the skepticism is warranted and the outcome genuinely unknown.
What to watch: which of the current testers — Altman, xAI, Thinking Machines, Anthropic — goes public with a use case first. Even the people who built the underlying models have a structural interest in seeing the device succeed. Beta enthusiasm from that cohort — reported by WIRED and The Information — is a leading indicator only, not a proof of product-market fit.