Samsung Acquires Israeli Tech Firm Corephotonics For $155M

South Korean tech giant Samsung has signed a deal to acquire Israeli tech firm Corephotonics for $155 million on Sunday, CTech reported Tuesday. Advanced talks have been under way since early January.

Corephotonics has developed dual camera technologies for mobile devices. The company aims to provide superior image quality by combining novel optics, mechanics and computational photography technologies. Its end-to-end multi-aperture solutions support a wide range of photography capabilities, such as optical zoom, low-light performance, Bokeh and depth features, and optical image stabilization, the company says.

Corephotonics was founded in 2012 by CEO David Mendlovic, VP R&D Dr. Gal Shabtay, Mr. Eran Kali, Dr. Noy Cohen, and Ephraim Goldenberg, and is headquartered in Ramat HaHayal.

To date, the company has raised over $50 million from investors including Samsung Ventures, a Samsung investment arm, Foxconn, Horizon Ventures, OurCrowd, SanDisk, Magma VC, Amiti Ventures and OurCrowd.

In late 2017, Corephotonics filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the US tech giant copied its patented camera technology and incorporated it into one of its most popular products, the iPhone. The suit, filed in November 2017 in federal court in California, said Apple used the Israeli company’s dual camera tech in the iPhone 7 and iPhone8 Plus without Corephotonics’s permission.