GoPro shareholders are getting $285 million in cash, about $1.14 a share, to merge the company with a private optics firm called Starman Optical. That price is 29.5% above where the stock last closed.
The deal was announced Tuesday morning. GoPro stays on the Nasdaq and keeps selling cameras, but the plan is to chase AI data center hardware and defense work. Current shareholders keep close to 10% of the combined business, and the company’s roughly $92 million of debt gets paid off when the deal closes. Both boards have approved it. Completion is expected by the end of 2026, pending shareholder and regulatory approval.
What Starman brings
Starman makes U.S.-built optical transceivers, the hardware that moves data around inside modern data centers. The merged company wants to sell into AI infrastructure and to government, defense, robotics and aerospace customers, with American-made components as the pitch. GoPro says it will keep supporting its current cameras and its subscription and cloud platform.
Founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman said the deal should let the company “grow across consumer, commercial and defense markets as a leading American imaging and optical solutions company.” He added: “We’re excited to combine with the Starman team to capitalize on this opportunity and play an important role in America’s future.”
How GoPro got here
In June, GoPro warned it might not survive the next 12 months without new funding. First-quarter sales fell 26% from a year earlier to $99 million. Camera sell-through dropped 29% to roughly 313,000 units, and the company posted a loss of $80.8 million. A spike in memory component costs made the outlook worse.
In July, Woodman agreed to supply $20 million in senior secured notes to buy time while the board reviewed its options.
The Markiplier stake
A day or so before the merger news, YouTuber Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier, disclosed an 8.5% stake in a Schedule 13G filing. That made him GoPro’s largest individual shareholder. He had shot behind-the-scenes footage for his film on GoPro cameras and became a vocal fan of the Mission 1 Pro ILS cinema camera. The stake sent the battered stock surging, and people compared it to the GameStop meme-stock episode.
GoPro once carried a valuation near $4 billion on its first day of trading in 2014. The merged company will still make cameras, the Mission 1 Pro ILS among them, but it plans to earn its money elsewhere.
