GoPro has announced that it’s entered into a “definitive merger agreement” with Starman Optical, a little-known entity described in the press release as a “privately held optical-photonics company.” According to current GoPro CEO Nick Woodman, the company hopes the move will help it “grow across consumer, commercial and defense markets,” and address “important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure.”

This is, to put it mildly, a bit of a pivot from its current role as an action camera company. A few hints suggest that the action camera business may not be going away, though. For one, GoPro promises it will “continue to fully support its existing consumer products and its subscription and cloud platform.” While that’s good news for anyone who just bought the Mission 1 Pro ILS, released just a week before this news broke, the word “existing” casts a bit of doubt on whether we’ll see new consumer cameras from the company in the future. 

There are a few references to the company’s “growth potential” in consumer markets, but there’s much heavier emphasis on US national security and manufacturing. GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman says the company plans to address “important areas of national security related to cameras, optics and AI infrastructure.” And Charles Tebele, CEO of Starman Holding, says “The combination of GoPro’s world-class optical expertise and intellectual property with Starman’s advanced transceiver capabilities and U.S. manufacturing platform creates a unique opportunity. Together, we intend to bring production of these critical components back to the United States.”

In the US, national security has long been big business, with lucrative military contracts sustaining many companies, even ones better known for their consumer products. But it’s become an increasingly hot-button topic in recent years, with the US government promising billions to companies making semiconductors within its borders, and placing import restrictions on companies like DJI based on perceived threats to national security. The company also promises to expand into the hot and controversial “AI Data Center” space, though to me that reads more as it filling out its bingo card of phrases you’re required to use in a press release in 2026.

As a camera company, GoPro has some share in the military industrial complex – when we interviewed NASA astronaut and US Air Force Col. Terry Virts in 2019, he said Russia beat the US to the punch by flying GoPros into space (though NASA has since included the cameras on multiple flights, including its recent Artemis II mission) – but it’s not exactly a major player. It’s clear its leadership sees the merger as an opportunity to change that, with intents to “leverage its IP, optics and imaging capabilities across defense, government, robotics and aerospace markets, building on demand for U.S.-made solutions.” Woodman reiterates that point, saying: “We’re excited to combine with the Starman team to capitalize on this opportunity and play an important role in America’s future.”

Mitchell Clark

GoPro has been in dire financial straits for a while, following years of Chinese competitors like DJI and Insta360 introducing action cameras that tempted would-be buyers away with innovative features, new form factors and larger sensors, while the Hero line largely stagnated. This year, the company announced the Mission 1 series that largely caught back up with, and in some respects surpassed, those competitors, but it may have been too late. Earlier this summer, it warned investors that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue in business. At the time, it said it was investigating “opportunities within the defense and aerospace sector.” Those investigations were apparently fruitful.

According to the press release, the merger – which will see $285 million paid to GoPro shareholders – will see the company’s $92 million in debt paid off, “resulting in a clean, substantially debt-free balance sheet.” The company will remain publicly listed, though its unclear whether that listing will be for GoPro alone or the newly combined entity; GoPro’s press release promises “additional information regarding the transaction upon closing.”

Finally, there’s the question of who Starman Optical is, and how it has the money to buy GoPro. As best I can tell, it’s a subsidiary of Starman Holding, a company that owns several sub-brands, including popular phone case and accessory companies like Incase and Incipio. While Starman Holding’s website doesn’t list Starman Optical as one of its companies, it does list Starman New Photonics, and its About Us page names Charlie Tebele as its CEO. The websites for both Starman Holding and Starman New Photonics don’t have a ton of information on them, though that’s not that odd for this kind of company.

GoPro expects the deal to close by the end of the year, assuming it’s approved by regulators and GoPro shareholders. 

Camera Intelligence, the company behind the Caira camera that attaches to the back of your iPhone, is adding even more AI features to the device. The app that powers the camera is getting the ability to edit videos shot on it using generative AI, building on a feature that allowed you to make similar adjustments to your photos.

The company says the feature will support a few types of edits: “relighting” footage (making a video shot at noon look like it was taken at golden hour, for instance), reframing it, emulating a camera motion like a tilt or pan and “set extension,” which the company says lets you “extend the world by 10 seconds beyond what was filmed on location.” The options are presented as templates that you can pick from, though there is a chatbot that you can use to give additional input; for example, you can use it to tell the AI that the “orbit” camera move should be centered around a specific person in the shot.

Camera Intelligence

The Caira shoots at up to 4K, though the clips produced by the generative AI are limited to 720 or 1080. The tool can use Google’s Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash model, or Runway’s Aleph 2.0, and gives you the option to select which one you’d like before setting it to work. The company says it takes one to three minutes to produce a finished video.

Camera Intelligence stresses that the tool can only be used to edit existing footage that you took with the camera, not create something entirely new. It’ll keep your original footage, and the generated file will have a Google SynthID watermark. The company says it started work on the feature after surveying 111 Kickstarter backers* and hearing from 77% of them that they’d like the feature. 

In a press release, it says the feature is designed for “solo creators and marketers who may not have the budget to commission this work and who are often overwhelmed by pro editing tools – but who are excited by these technologies and what they make possible.”

Generating video, like generating images, isn’t particularly cheap. The company says the feature will be available “alongside Generative Image Editing and a yet-to-be-announced feature” as part of Caira Studio, which is launching later this year. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but the company has made it clear from the start that generative editing features would require a subscription. The Kickstarter page promised that the “Caira Pro” plan would be $7 a month, but that only included stills editing.

Camera Intelligence says the generative video editing feature will only be available in the US and UK.

Watching the samples that Camera Intelligence included in its announcement video, I understand why the company is pitching this as a prototyping tool – something you can use to see if a shot will work before actually trying to capture it – rather than something you’d use to produce final footage. While the company says the Omni model is “physics-aware and remembers the scene across an entire clip,” if you look close you can definitely still see some AI artifacting. 

Even if the model produced perfect footage, this still isn’t the kind of tool I’d like to use. But it doesn’t surprise me that the people who initially backed the camera based on the pitch of its AI capabilities are interested in it, and it seems like a natural extension of the work Camera Intelligence was already doing. I’m just not sure this feature will entice anyone else to buy the Caira if they weren’t already sold, or demand that the traditional camera makers start building something similar. 

* Speaking of those backers, the company says it’s “delivered the majority of Kickstarter units” of the Caira and is delivering the outstanding ones on a monthly basis.