GoPro is telling investors on Monday that it may not survive the next 12 months. In an 8-K filed with the SEC (1) on Monday, the action-camera maker refiled its 2025 financial statements with a notable addition: Its auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, now warns of “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
PwC, which has audited GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO) since 2011, said GoPro “has incurred operating losses and negative operating cash flows, and has obligations under its financing arrangements which become due within the next twelve months if certain covenants are not met.”
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The market response was swift. GPRO shares fell from $1.26 on Friday to around $1.10 on Monday. On Tuesday morning shares were trading (2) at around $1.11.
From an $11 billion Wall Street darling to a penny stock
GoPro’s story began with a rubber band and a surfboard. Founder Nick Woodman, a 1997 UC San Diego visual-arts graduate (3), came up with the idea on a 2002 surfing trip to Australia and Indonesia after he strapped a 35mm camera to his wrist to film himself in the water. He bankrolled the company by borrowing roughly $235,000 from his parents (4) and selling bead-and-shell necklaces out of a Volkswagen bus. The first GoPro retailed for around $30.
It was Woodman’s third shot at building a startup. Two earlier ventures had fallen apart — including a gaming venture called Funbug, which went under in 2001 and took $3.9 million in investor money with it (5). Woodman has said the fear of failing again is what drove him to make GoPro work.
GoPro went public on June 26, 2014, at $24 a share (6). Investors loved the initial pitch: a hardware company that was also a media brand, with footage racking up billions of YouTube views. GoPro closed its first day at $31.34, (7) which valued the company at almost $4 billion. (At its current share price, it’s now only worth around $188 million.) The stock reached an all-time closing high of $93.85 on October 7 that year (8), pushing GoPro’s market value past $11 billion.
Woodman was briefly crowned the highest-paid CEO in America. According to CNN Money (9), he “was awarded a package of restricted stock units that at the end of 2014 was valued at an eye-popping $284.5 million,” making him the No. 1 American executive in the Bloomberg Pay Index.
Then came the slide. Smartphone cameras kept improving until casual users didn’t need a separate device, and cheaper rivals undercut GoPro at the low end. The company’s big bet on diversification, the Karma drone, became a fiasco. GoPro’s own November 2016 recall notice (10) pulled “approximately 2,500 Karma drones” after units “lost power during operation” — in some cases falling out of the sky. GoPro discontinued the drone line in 2018. By then, Bloomberg reported (11), GoPro had cut Woodman’s cash compensation to $1 and laid off more than 20% of its workforce.
A precarious 12 months
According to its 8-K, GoPro’s dealing with a cash crunch and a tricky debt structure. GoPro’s revenue fell to $651.5 million in 2025, down from $801.5 million in 2024 and more than $1 billion in 2023. Hardware revenue alone collapsed from $908 million in 2023 to $545 million last year. The company lost $93.5 million in 2025 and ended December with just $49.7 million in cash, down from $222.7 million two years earlier.
To stay afloat, GoPro has leaned on lenders. It signed a $50 million loan (12) with hedge fund Farallon Capital Management in August 2025 to help repay a $93.8 million convertible note that matured that November. As part of the deal, GoPro issued Farallon warrants to buy nearly 11.1 million shares at $0.75. Farallon, the San Francisco-based hedge fund founded by Tom Steyer in 1986 (13), has long specialized in distressed credit.
In February of this year, GoPro added $50 million in convertible long-term debt. In April, it announced it was cutting almost a quarter (14) of its workforce.
The loans carry covenants GoPro increasingly can’t meet, including a minimum-liquidity requirement that rises to $40 million by September 2026 and escalating EBITDA targets. They also contain cross-default provisions — meaning a default on one loan triggers defaults on the others, potentially letting every lender demand immediate repayment at once. The 8-K filing warns lenders “may assert” the going-concern paragraph itself counts as an event of default. GoPro said it is “in active discussions” with Farallon, Wells Fargo and Yorkville.
Then there’s the recent shortage of memory chips, a.k.a “RAMageddon.” As AI data centers gobble up global supply, prices have surged. (15)GoPro’s filing flagged an 80% to 115% spike in the last week of March alone as suppliers cut production. And unfortunately, the company is sitting on a non-cancelable purchase commitment for memory components to the tune of $24.5 million — a painful obligation for a company starving for cash.
The company is searching for a way out. GoPro says it hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey (16)to explore a possible sale, and in April it engaged advisors to explore the defense and aerospace sector, noting its cameras were mounted on the Artemis II Orion spacecraft. But it’s unclear if any of these moves will be enough to buoy GoPro. As it said in the filing, without new financing or a strategic deal, the company “may be required to significantly reduce, restructure, cease operations, or seek protection under the Federal bankruptcy laws.”
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U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (1), (12); Yahoo Finance (2); Today UCSD (3); CNBC (4); Talkroute (5); Fortune (6); CNET (7); Macrotrends (8); Hartford Business Journal (9); GoPro Investor Relations (10), (16); Bloomberg (11); Farallon Capital Management (13); The Verge (14); TrendForce (15)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: The rise and fall of GoPro, which says it has ‘substantial doubt’ the company can survive another year
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