Wish to earn money? Begin constructing information facilities. Or construct batteries to energy information 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 buyers recently. Ford’s nascent vitality storage enterprise — a fraction in measurement to Tesla’s and gained’t be prepared till subsequent 12 months — helped its inventory bounce more than it has in years. Redwood Supplies raised $425 million from blue chip firms like Google and Nvidia by pivoting to data center energy storage. Cerebras simply pulled off one among the hottest IPOs of 2026.
Funding in protection startups continues to pour in, with Anduril elevating another $5 billion this week. It appears that evidently any firm with a distant probability at nabbing authorities contracts is making an attempt to just do that.
Which brings us to GoPro.
The motion digital camera firm has survived so much through the years. For some time in the course of the 2010s, the time period “GoPro killer” was virtually as frequent 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 value basically 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 a corporation that mixes top-tier picture high quality with sufficient sturdiness to resist a bike crash, or a fall from space. And the pivot was sufficient to almost double the corporate’s inventory value for a number of days. However that, too, has fallen again to Earth. It appears the “pivot to protection” concept isn’t as bulletproof as GoPro’s cameras, in any case.
You possibly can 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 options.” The corporate’s board of administrators stated it just lately acquired “a number of unsolicited inbound strategic inquiries from events throughout varied sectors together with protection, shopper and monetary,” which is quite a 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 somewhat 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 risky world. It’s no shock {that a} massively ballooning Pentagon budget appears to be like like a viable path by means of the churn.
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