Want to make money? Start building data centers. Or build batteries to power data centers. Or: pivot to defense.
This is not financial advice, but it’s certainly what seems to be winning over public markets and private investors lately. Ford’s nascent energy storage business — a fraction in size to Tesla’s and won’t be ready until next year — helped its stock jump more than it has in years. Redwood Materials raised $425 million from blue chip companies like Google and Nvidia by pivoting to data center energy storage. Cerebras just pulled off one of the hottest IPOs of 2026.
Investment in defense startups continues to pour in, with Anduril raising another $5 billion this week. It seems that any company with a remote chance at nabbing government contracts is trying to do just that.
Which brings us to GoPro.
The action camera company has survived a lot over the years. For a while during the 2010s, the term “GoPro killer” was almost as common as “Tesla killer” or “iPhone killer,” with people claiming everything from a TomTom action camera to Google’s Clips (remember that?) would dethrone the California company that invented the category.
Survival does not necessarily mean success, though, and GoPro has struggled of late. Sales are down, losses are up, and its stock price essentially flatlined at about $1 two years ago. So, surprise, last month GoPro announced a plan to “explore defense and aerospace market opportunities.”
It makes a certain amount of sense for a company that combines top-tier image quality with enough durability to withstand a motorcycle crash, or a fall from space. And the pivot was enough to nearly double the company’s stock price for a few days. But that, too, has fallen back to Earth. It seems the “pivot to defense” idea is not as bulletproof as GoPro’s cameras, after all.
You can maybe guess where this is going. On Thursday, GoPro announced it hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey to help evaluate a “potential sale and other strategic alternatives.” The company’s board of directors said it recently received “several unsolicited inbound strategic inquiries from parties across various sectors including defense, consumer and financial,” which is a lot of words to effectively say: “Uh-oh.”
It’s not the first time GoPro has considered a sale; founder and CEO Nick Woodman it was briefly on the table back in 2018.
But things are certainly now more dire for the company. Not only are its financials deteriorating, the company announced last month that it’s laying off a quarter of its workforce, which has already shrunk to a little more than 600 workers after once employing as many as 1,500.
GoPro was a tech darling 15 years ago. But like so many of us, it now finds itself navigating a more volatile world. It’s no surprise that a massively ballooning Pentagon budget looks like a viable path through the churn.
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