Need to earn cash? Get started development information facilities. Or construct batteries to energy information facilities. Or … pivot to protection.
This isn’t monetary recommendation, but it surely’s indubitably what appears to be successful over public markets and personal traders in recent years. Ford’s nascent energy-storage industry — a fragment in dimension to Tesla’s and received’t be able till subsequent 12 months — helped its inventory soar greater than it has in years. Redwood Fabrics raised $425 million from blue chip firms like Google and Nvidia by means of pivoting to information heart calories garage. Cerebras simply pulled off one among the freshest IPOs of 2026.
Funding in protection startups continues to pour in, with Anduril elevating any other $5 billion this week. It kind of feels that any corporate with a far off probability at nabbing executive contracts is attempting to just do that.
Which brings us to GoPro.
The motion digicam corporate has survived so much through the years. For some time all through the 2010s, the time period “GoPro killer” used to be nearly as commonplace as “Tesla killer” or “iPhone killer,” with folks claiming the whole thing from a TomTom motion digicam to Google’s Clips (remember the fact that?) would dethrone the California corporate that invented the class.
Survival does now not essentially imply luck, even though, and GoPro has struggled of overdue. Gross sales are down, losses are up, and its inventory worth necessarily flatlined at about $1 two years in the past. So, wonder, remaining month GoPro introduced a plan to “discover protection and aerospace marketplace alternatives.”
It makes a certain quantity of sense for an organization that mixes top-tier symbol high quality with sufficient sturdiness to resist a motorbike crash, or a fall from house. And the pivot used to be sufficient to almost double the corporate’s inventory worth for a couple of days. However that, too, has fallen again to Earth. It kind of feels the “pivot to protection” thought isn’t as bulletproof as GoPro’s cameras, in spite of everything.
You’ll be able to perhaps bet the place that is going. On Thursday, GoPro introduced it employed funding financial institution Houlihan Lokey to assist review a “attainable sale and different strategic possible choices.” The corporate’s board of administrators stated it not too long ago won “a number of unsolicited inbound strategic inquiries from events throughout quite a lot of sectors together with protection, shopper and fiscal,” which is numerous phrases to successfully say: “Uh-oh.”
It’s now not the primary time GoPro has regarded as a sale; founder and CEO Nick Woodman stated it used to be in short at the desk again in 2018.
However issues are indubitably now extra dire for the corporate. No longer handiest are its financials deteriorating, but additionally the corporate introduced remaining month that it’s shedding 1 / 4 of its body of workers, which has already shriveled to fewer than 600 employees after as soon as using as many as 1,500.
GoPro used to be a tech darling 15 years in the past. However like such a lot of people, it now unearths itself navigating a extra risky global. It’s no wonder {that a} hugely ballooning Pentagon price range seems like a viable trail during the churn.
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