GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman published an open letter Thursday telling customers the company will keep building cameras after its merger with Starman Optical. The letter, posted to GoPro’s news blog and addressed to “our GoPro community, fans and customers,” says GoPro plans to deliver “more innovative cameras, smarter accessories, and more powerful software and services” once the deal closes. It names no camera and no date.

The letter arrives two days after GoPro agreed to sell 90% of itself to Starman for $285 million, a deal that points the 24-year-old camera maker at AI data center, government, defense, and aerospace markets. Woodman opens by acknowledging “some concern” about GoPro’s post-merger commitment to camera development. He then spends five paragraphs saying that commitment is intact.

On Tuesday, I wrote that the word to watch in GoPro’s merger announcement was “existing,” because supporting existing products is a different promise than shipping new ones. Woodman’s letter answers that directly. The answer is a promise of more cameras, with nothing attached to it.

Woodman’s Letter Promises Cameras And Names None

The September 3 letter commits GoPro to “more innovative cameras” without identifying a model or a date. It attributes the future to Starman’s balance sheet, says Starman shares GoPro’s passion for the brand, and closes with the “Be a HERO” slogan. Each camera sentence is a plan or an expectation.

“Making amazing cameras for all of you is our core DNA,” Woodman writes, adding that this “will never change.” He credits the merger’s “improved financial strength” for putting GoPro in a better position to invent, and points to 2,500-plus patents over 24 years as proof it has been busy. The goal he describes, “a more diversified company” that is stronger financially, is the framing GoPro’s merger announcement used on September 1.

What the letter leaves out is anything a buyer could hold GoPro to. There is no mention of a HERO14 or a Mission 2, and nothing about a successor to the 197-gram MISSION 1 PRO ILS that GoPro declared available on September 2, one day after signing the merger. There is no statement about the size of the camera engineering team after closing, or what share of Starman’s capital goes to consumer hardware. The letter ends with a securities-law disclaimer, the same “No Offer or Solicitation” and forward-looking-statements language GoPro attaches to its SEC solicitation filings. That marks the reassurance as merger solicitation material, and every camera promise in it as a forward-looking statement that “could differ materially.”

GoPro Told Employees Specifics Wait Until The Deal Closes

The letter’s silence on products matches what GoPro told its own staff. In a September 1 email disclosed in a Schedule 14A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Woodman wrote that GoPro would not share more specifics on its go-forward strategy until after closing, expected before year-end.

The same filing shows who GoPro is merging with. Starman Optical, Inc. is a Delaware company wholly owned by Action Acquisitions LLC, and TechCrunch reported that Starman Optical was incorporated on August 31, one day before the announcement, while the transceiver business, Starman New Photonics, dates to 2025 and is still building its New Jersey factory. The employee email calls Starman an “up and coming” US transceiver maker whose high-margin revenue is expected to fund GoPro’s move into new markets. Expected, not booked.

The customer email in the same filing is the closest GoPro has come to a hardware commitment: “The current product lineup stays in production and remains available for purchase.” That sentence covers cameras that already exist. Woodman’s public letter adds the word “more” and stops there.

GoPro Has Spent A Year Promising A Product Pipeline

GoPro’s forward-looking language about cameras predates the merger by ten months, and the year in between was the worst in the company’s history. Read against that record, a promise with no product attached lands differently with this audience than it would with a general reader.

In November 2025, Woodman bought $2 million of GoPro stock and said the purchase reflected his excitement for GoPro’s “diversified product pipeline in 2026 and beyond,” according to the company’s announcement. In April 2026, GoPro laid off about a quarter of its workforce and introduced the Mission 1 lineup. On May 11, the board announced a review of strategic alternatives with Houlihan Lokey. In June, GoPro told investors there was substantial doubt it could continue as a going concern. In July, Woodman lent the company roughly $20 million through senior secured notes; GoPro’s own prospectus supplement says that even with that money it did not expect to have enough liquidity to meet its financing obligations.

The company has also cut a product this community bought before. The Karma drone was recalled weeks after its 2016 launch and shut down for good in January 2018. And GoPro has been selling off imaging patents from the pile Woodman now cites as proof of innovation: Skydio bought 114 of them in November 2024 for its own government-focused business.

DroneXL’s Take

Give Woodman this: the letter is more than the press release offered. Tuesday’s announcement promised to “fully support” existing consumer products. Thursday’s letter promises more cameras. That is a real change in wording, and it came because customers made noise, which is the only pressure this audience can still apply.

Wording is where it stops. A promise of “more innovative cameras” with no model and no date is what a CEO writes when the people about to own 90% of his company have not told him what he is allowed to build. The employee email says as much: no specifics until closing. The letter cannot be a roadmap because the roadmap does not yet belong to GoPro. It belongs to a holding company whose operating subsidiary was incorporated the day before the deal, and it gets written after the stockholders vote.

The disclaimer tells you the rest. A letter that opens with “our collective stoke” and closes with several hundred words of forward-looking-statements boilerplate knows which audience it is really for. The fans get the stoke. The SEC gets the caveats.

FPV pilots need to know whether the ILS gets firmware in 2027, whether a second body follows, and whether GoPro’s camera engineers survive the year. None of that is in this letter. My read is that it is missing because nobody at GoPro is currently permitted to know it, and a CEO who cannot say what the plan is falls back on saying who he is. That is the job “core DNA” is doing in this document.

The proxy statement GoPro must file before the stockholder vote is where the real answer lives. It will lay out the merger agreement and the board’s reasons for taking $1.14 a share, including what Starman told the board about its plans for the business. If a camera commitment exists anywhere in this deal, that document is where it lives. Until it shows up there, treat “more cameras” the way you treat any spec GoPro has not shipped: as marketing.

Source: GoPro (Letter from Nick), GoPro merger announcement, SEC Schedule 14A, TechCrunch.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.