GoPro

GoPro
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Consumer electronics, Cameras
Founded	2002
Founder	Nick Woodman
Headquarters	San Mateo, California, United States
Notable Personnel	Nicholas Woodman (Founder and CEO)
Products	Action cameras (HERO line), 360-degree cameras (Fusion, MAX, MAX2), GoPro Odyssey VR rig
Website	https://gopro.com

GoPro is an American consumer electronics company best known for its HERO line of action cameras. It was founded in 2002 by Nick Woodman and is headquartered in San Mateo, California; the company went public on the NASDAQ on June 26, 2014, under the ticker symbol GPRO.

Within Virtual Reality and 360-degree media, GoPro is most associated with the GoPro Odyssey, a 16-camera rig built with Google for the Jump VR video platform, and with the Fusion and MAX families of consumer 360-degree cameras. These products let creators capture spherical and stereoscopic video for VR headsets and for 360-degree video on services such as YouTube.

Company background

Nick Woodman founded GoPro in 2002 after a surfing trip during which he could not find an affordable way to capture close-up action photographs. The company built its business on small, rugged, wearable action cameras and on the HERO brand, and Woodman has served as chief executive since 2004. GoPro's 2014 initial public offering priced shares at 24 US dollars and the stock rose about 38 percent on its first day of trading.

GoPro entered immersive media as 360-degree video and consumer VR gained attention in the mid-2010s. Its first dedicated VR-capture product, the Odyssey, was a professional camera array, after which the company moved to single-unit consumer 360 cameras with the Fusion in 2017 and the MAX in 2019.

GoPro Odyssey

The GoPro Odyssey is a panoramic camera rig that combines 16 GoPro HERO4 Black cameras into a single ring-shaped array. GoPro and Google announced it on September 8, 2015, and it was the first camera designed for Google's Jump, a platform that captured 3D, 360-degree footage and assembled it into stereoscopic VR video. The rig used genlock synchronization so that all 16 cameras exposed frames together, multi-camera control, and extended battery life to make 360-degree capture more practical.

Footage from the Odyssey was uploaded to Google's Jump Assembler, a cloud service that stitched the 16 video feeds into a contiguous stereoscopic 360-degree scene, a task Google said its algorithms could complete in hours rather than the weeks manual stitching took. The Odyssey could capture 360-degree video at up to 8K resolution and 30 frames per second. GoPro sold the Odyssey for 15,000 US dollars through a restricted Odyssey Limited Access Program: professional creators had to apply to buy the array, and shipments began in November 2015.

The Odyssey was the first of two Jump rigs. In April 2017 Google introduced a second-generation rig, the Yi Halo, built with the Chinese camera maker Yi Technology, which used 17 cameras to capture 8K-by-8K stereoscopic video at 30 frames per second and sold for about 17,000 US dollars.

Google retired the Jump platform in 2019. It stopped accepting uploads for processing on June 26, 2019, and shut the service down on June 28, citing declining use of Jump Assembler as other stitching solutions appeared. Existing rigs such as the Odyssey and Yi Halo could still be used with third-party stitching software after the shutdown.

Fusion

The GoPro Fusion is a consumer 360-degree camera that GoPro began shipping in November 2017 at a price of 699 US dollars. Unlike the multi-camera Odyssey, the Fusion uses two opposed fisheye lenses in a single handheld unit. It records spherical video at up to 5.2K at 30 frames per second, or 3K at 60 frames per second, and captures 18-megapixel spherical photos. The camera is waterproof to about 5 meters (16 feet).

The companion GoPro Fusion Studio software stitched the two lens feeds into 360-degree footage and supported a feature GoPro called OverCapture, which let a user reframe the spherical recording into a standard, flat (non-360) clip by choosing any viewing angle after the fact. GoPro discontinued the Fusion after launching the MAX, and ended support for the Fusion Studio application, which it stopped updating around 2020.

MAX and MAX2

GoPro released the MAX, a single-unit 360-degree camera, toward the end of 2019. It captures spherical video at up to 5.6K resolution and uses two lenses, and it can also function as a conventional wide-angle action camera. On February 19, 2025, GoPro refreshed the MAX with revised mounting and a new battery while keeping the 5.6K resolution, and set its price at 350 US dollars, about 150 US dollars below the original.

On September 23, 2025, GoPro announced the MAX2 alongside two other products, and began shipping it on September 30, 2025, at a price of 499.99 US dollars. GoPro described the MAX2 as a True 8K 360-degree camera and the only 360 camera with built-in GPS. It records 10-bit color with GP-Log encoding, captures 29-megapixel 360-degree photos, uses a six-microphone array, and has twist-and-go replaceable glass lenses. Spherical footage from the MAX and MAX2 can be exported as flat reframed clips or kept as full 360-degree video for VR and online viewing.

VR and 360 relevance

GoPro's place in virtual reality comes from immersive video capture rather than headsets or platforms. The Odyssey supplied much of the early professional hardware for Google's Jump, one of the better known cinematic VR pipelines of the mid-2010s, and it competed in that period with rigs and cameras from Jaunt, Nokia, and Facebook's Surround360. On the consumer side, the Fusion and MAX put 360-degree and reframable capture into a single handheld camera, a category in which GoPro competes with the Samsung Gear 360 and with Insta360. Footage from these cameras is monoscopic or stereoscopic depending on the device, with the Odyssey and Yi Halo capturing stereoscopic 3D for VR headsets and the consumer 360 cameras recording monoscopic spherical video.

Current status

As of 2026 GoPro remains a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ and continues to sell 360-degree cameras, with the MAX and MAX2 in its lineup. In April 2026 the company signed a lease for new offices in San Mateo, California, planning to relocate its headquarters in 2027. On May 13, 2026, GoPro said it had engaged the investment bank Houlihan Lokey to evaluate strategic alternatives, including a potential sale of the company, with Woodman stating that the review was intended to maximize shareholder value.