OpenAI Acquires Apple Veteran’s AI-Device Start-Up, Aims at Consumer Products

Sam Altman’s generative AI firm, OpenAI, is acquiring io, a secretive start-up founded by Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, alongside ex-Apple colleagues Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan.

The $6.5 billion deal will see around 55 engineers and developers join OpenAI, with the first devices expected to launch in 2026.

LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm established after his departure from Apple, has been collaborating with OpenAI for two years on generative AI devices, a notoriously challenging sector where start-ups like Humane, with its AI Pin, have struggled due to high computational demands.

While Ive himself will not join OpenAI, his firm LoveFrom will lead the design direction for OpenAI’s entire product ecosystem, including software. This marks a major design coup, signalling OpenAI’s ambition to move beyond tools and help define the next significant product category.

“I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in a joint interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. “It’s a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products.”

The acquisition is the largest in OpenAI’s history and aims to establish a dedicated unit within the company for developing AI-powered consumer products.

After Ive’s departure from Apple, CEO Tim Cook expressed interest in continuing to work together, but no collaborative products materialised. Ive is now forging a new partnership with Sam Altman, whom he describes as a “rare visionary.”

Once dubbed Steve Jobs’ “spiritual partner,” Ive’s move to create competing technology products could present challenges for Apple, which is already contending with difficulties in the AI space. In the interview, Altman remarked that Jobs would be “damn proud” of Ive’s decision.

OpenAI Acquires Windsurf

This acquisition follows OpenAI’s recent purchase of Windsurf , formerly known as Codeium for around $3 billion. With the acquisition of io, OpenAI has now completed its largest deal to date.

The Windsurf acquisition strengthened OpenAI’s position in the AI-driven coding assistant market, enabling it to generate code from natural language prompts. With this, OpenAI has positioned itself against coding platforms such as Cursor, Lovable, Vercel’s v0, Replit and others.

OpenAI has prioritised integrating advanced coding tools into its ecosystem. The company announced that its newly released o3 and o4-mini models outperform their predecessors, delivering 20% fewer serious errors than the o1 model, as verified by external experts in benchmark tests.