Wish to earn money? Begin constructing knowledge facilities. Or construct batteries to energy knowledge facilities. Or: pivot to protection.
This isn’t monetary recommendation, but it surely’s actually what appears to be successful over public markets and personal traders currently. Ford’s nascent vitality storage enterprise — a fraction in measurement to Tesla’s and gained’t be prepared till subsequent yr — helped its inventory bounce more than it has in years. Redwood Supplies raised $425 million from blue chip corporations like Google and Nvidia by pivoting to data center energy storage. Cerebras simply pulled off one of many hottest IPOs of 2026.
Funding in protection startups continues to pour in, with Anduril elevating one other $5 billion this week. Plainly any firm with a distant likelihood at nabbing authorities contracts is attempting to do exactly that.
Which brings us to GoPro.
The motion digicam firm has survived quite a bit over time. For some time in the course of the 2010s, the time period “GoPro killer” was virtually as widespread as “Tesla killer” or “iPhone killer,” with folks claiming every little thing from a TomTom action camera to Google’s Clips (remember that?) would dethrone the California firm that invented the class.
Survival doesn’t essentially imply success, although, and GoPro has struggled of late. Gross sales are down, losses are up, and its inventory worth primarily flatlined at about $1 two years in the past. So, shock, final month GoPro introduced a plan to “discover protection and aerospace market alternatives.”
It makes a specific amount of sense for an organization that mixes top-tier picture high quality with sufficient sturdiness to face up to a bike crash, or a fall from space. And the pivot was sufficient to almost double the corporate’s inventory worth for a number of days. However that, too, has fallen again to Earth. It appears the “pivot to protection” thought just isn’t as bulletproof as GoPro’s cameras, in spite of everything.
You’ll be able to perhaps guess the place that is going. On Thursday, GoPro introduced it employed funding financial institution Houlihan Lokey to help evaluate a “potential sale and different strategic alternate options.” The corporate’s board of administrators stated it just lately acquired “a number of unsolicited inbound strategic inquiries from events throughout numerous sectors together with protection, shopper and monetary,” which is a whole lot of phrases to successfully say: “Uh-oh.”
It’s not the primary time GoPro has thought of a sale; founder and CEO Nick Woodman it was briefly on the table back in 2018.
However issues are actually now extra dire for the corporate. Not solely are its financials deteriorating, the corporate introduced final month that it’s shedding 1 / 4 of its workforce, which has already shrunk to a bit of greater than 600 staff after as soon as using as many as 1,500.
GoPro was a tech darling 15 years in the past. However like so many people, it now finds itself navigating a extra unstable world. It’s no shock {that a} massively ballooning Pentagon budget seems to be like a viable path via the churn.
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