Produced by | Frontier of Entrepreneurship

Art Editor | Xing Jing

Reviewed by | Song Wen

On August 13, GoPro released its Q2 financials: revenue of $105 million, down 31% year-over-year, and a net loss of $51 million. Its sale evaluation, initiated in May, has entered its “final stage.” At its peak, GoPro held over 90% of the action camera market share; now, it awaits a buyer.

Just the day before, Shenzhen-based Insta360 unveiled its new flagship panoramic camera, the X6, dubbed the “decade masterpiece.” At a pre-launch closed-door session, founder Liu Jingkang admitted: “We’ve indeed hit the current hardware technology ceiling for panoramic cameras.”

However, hitting the chip ceiling doesn’t mean hitting the market ceiling. While chips and sensors may have peaked, locking in current hardware performance limits, the real questions—how many people a category can reach, how many scenarios it can enter, and how large its sales scale can grow—remain open.

Yet, the new king’s battlefield is far from peaceful. In July of last year, DJI entered the panoramic arena with the Osmo 360. According to IDC data, in Q1 of this year, Insta360 held about 68% of the global panoramic camera shipment share, with DJI at around 22%; by revenue, Insta360’s market share reached 71%. GoPro and others have become “others” in the market.

The walls are crumbling further. New players are emerging: Photonic Leap, founded by a CTO from Dreame, secured tens of millions in angel round funding; Looki, founded by a former Meituan executive, released a wearable AI camera. The story of “AI cameras” seems to be one anyone can tell.

Against this backdrop, Insta360’s 2025 annual report shows a “divergence”: revenue of RMB 9.741 billion, up 74.76% year-over-year; net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 929 million, down 6.62%; R&D investment of RMB 1.53 billion, accounting for 15.7% of revenue. The company explains this as “increased strategic R&D investment.” Liu Jingkang puts it more bluntly: the profit “lost” from hardware sales can be offset by services derived from AI servers, forming a new business closed loop—essentially, hedging.

Hardware profits are thinning, but AI services are growing. Once cameras can shoot clearly and comprehensively, what else can they do for people? Insta360’s answer: make cameras “invisible,” offloading terminal-side issues like image quality and editing to cloud-based AI.

The story begins in 2015. Liu Jingkang, born in 1991 and a software engineering graduate from Nanjing University, created a “Top University Livestream” product during college. Frustrated by unclear video quality, he shifted focus to developing a camera that could shoot panoramic video with one click. A year after graduation, he co-founded Insta360.

In 2016, Insta360’s first consumer-grade panoramic camera, the Nano, plugged directly into an iPhone’s port, solving the cumbersome issue of panoramic footage transfer. It became a star product at CES, even earning praise from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

But the hit didn’t last long. After sales declined, the team analyzed user data and found that frequent users of panoramic cameras were skiers, cyclists, and surfers—people who couldn’t spare a hand to frame shots. Panoramic cameras’ “shoot first, frame later” feature perfectly solved this problem.

There was an even more primitive clue: since the Nano required a connected phone to operate, some users glued their phones to the panoramic camera with heavy-duty adhesive, fixed it to helmets or selfie sticks, and shared it in user groups.

From then on, Insta360 stopped cramming the same camera into every market and instead rebuilt hardware for specific scenarios.

In 2017, the first 360° panoramic action camera, the ONE, was released, featuring an invisible selfie stick and bullet time effect, breaking GoPro’s dominance in sports imaging. In 2018, the ONE X introduced 5.7K panoramic video and FlowState stabilization technology.

Subsequently, the Insta360 EVO, Insta360 ONE R, and the evolving X series followed, with resolutions climbing from 5.7K to 8K, sensors growing from 1/2.3-inch to 1/1.28-inch, and stabilization evolving from algorithms to AI triple-chip architectures. Generation after generation of technological updates propelled Insta360 from a challenger to a leader.

By 2025, Insta360 had secured the No. 1 global market share in panoramic cameras for eight consecutive years, establishing itself as the absolute leader in the category.

From 2015 to 2020, Insta360 achieved cumulative sales of over 1 million units. By the time the X3 was released in 2022, it took just over a year to ship another million units. Insta360’s first million units took five years; the second, two years. Since then, the cycle to reach each subsequent million has continued to shrink, with the latest milestone taking just six months.

Alongside rising sales, panoramic cameras have transformed from niche gear for Everest climbers into everyday tools for family documentation.

With numbers soaring, Liu Jingkang doesn’t believe they’ve hit their limit: “The day panoramic cameras become as ubiquitous as mineral water, tissues, or smartphones—that’s when we’ll truly discuss the ceiling.”

2. The Data Moat and a Long-Term Vision

Qi Lu (Gavin), head of Insta360’s research institute, joined in 2024.

On August 12, the day of the X6 launch, he told *Frontier of Entrepreneurship* that he left ByteDance’s video generation data team after realizing a problem: “Mainstream video data is shot from fixed perspectives, inherently lacking information.” 360° omnidirectional footage, he argued, is a superior data source for the AI era.

What convinced him to join was Insta360’s internal vision, codenamed “Cameraman”—an intelligent system capable of accurately understanding user intent, autonomous shooting, automatic editing, and sharing.

Qi Lu recalled his first meeting with Liu Jingkang in a Shanghai teahouse, where they discussed Cameraman’s business and technology for over three hours. “That’s when it was basically decided,” he said.

According to Qi Lu, the Cameraman plan was first proposed internally in 2018 or 2019. By 2019, Insta360 began stockpiling expertise in three technical directions: Imaging, AI, and Robotics, corresponding to the eyes, brain, and body.

By 2023, Liu Jingkang had already shown Qi Lu the first-generation drone prototype and some pre-mass-production features. The panoramic drone could be seen as an early incarnation of Cameraman. “It frees the shooter’s hands for effortless recording,” Qi Lu said.

Thus, Cameraman became clearer. Its core competitiveness lies in integrating Insta360’s years of accumulated capabilities in imaging, audio, gimbal, drone, and AI algorithms into a single technical framework—rather than building a general-purpose robot from scratch.

For a hardware company, however, Cameraman still needs time. Closer at hand is data.

Qi Lu told *Frontier of Entrepreneurship* that since 2018, Insta360 has built its own data annotation team, accumulating over 10,000 hours of panoramic data across 30+ scenarios in seven to eight years. A single training set for depth prediction tasks contains 2 million images. “We realized early on that data is the core law for building standards,” he said.

Data has also shifted the company’s stance on open-source. Qi Lu didn’t shy away from internal debates: open-source versus closed-source ultimately hinges on whether to disclose technology. The company leaned toward open-source, reasoning, “We hope to build the panoramic ecosystem through industry collaboration, and these capabilities will ultimately enhance product competitiveness.”

In January, Insta360 open-sourced its panoramic depth model, DAP360. Bad cases reported by the community became fuel for improving its proprietary models. Qi Lu explained: “If you only have one ‘eye’ in front, you can’t avoid obstacles coming from behind.” In Insta360’s vision, this data could also serve robot obstacle avoidance and spatial understanding, positioning the camera company as a potential visual infrastructure provider.

The same pragmatic logic applies to large model selection.

GO Ultra’s AI voice assistant, Kira, integrates Alibaba’s QianWen in China and Google’s Gemini overseas, while developing voiceprint recognition and command words in-house. “For core technologies with Insta360’s unique strengths, we prefer in-house R&D; for general capabilities, we prefer collaboration with external partners,” Qi Lu told *Frontier of Entrepreneurship*.

This “core in-house + general collaborative” model has kept the hardware company on track amid the AI wave.

3. Outsourcing Editing to AI, Integrating Recording into Life

Five days before the X6 launch on August 7, Kira debuted with a GO Ultra firmware update. Insta360 defines Kira as a “pocket AI guide” rather than an all-powerful AI assistant.

The scenario: when users’ hands are occupied during cycling or surfing, asking for directions or checking the weather disrupts the experience. Kira offers face-to-face translation, image-based Q&A, and voice Q&A, offloading complex computations to phones and the cloud while keeping only command words, voiceprints, and data collection local. The 53-gram device’s power consumption increase is minimal.

Moreover, Insta360’s philosophy is that hardware isn’t finalized at launch: older models can unlock new features via OTA updates.

Bigger changes came to editing. The biggest pain point of panoramic cameras isn’t capture but the tedious post-shooting editing. The X6’s zero-editing feature runs on Insta360’s proprietary panoramic AI model, PanoMind, trained on the aforementioned data. Its AI director identifies highlights, generates virtual camera movements, and scores each clip’s editability.

Users plug in the camera to charge, and it automatically selects and edits footage overnight, pushing finished videos to their phones by morning. Liu Jingkang sums it up as: “The user sleeps; the camera works.”

The Moment Pro goes further, letting users set themes and styles in natural language, with AI selecting footage and structuring narratives. Insta360 charges RMB 6 per cloud-based AI edit, with an AI export rate of nearly 60%. Users pay for “automatic output,” not raw compute or storage.

Tasks once reserved for post-production software are now shifting to the cloud.

The path hasn’t been easy. Qi Lu admitted to *Frontier of Entrepreneurship* that photography is highly subjective—“a thousand faces” pose the biggest challenge for auto-editing, requiring the model to infer aesthetic preferences from user behavior.

He revealed that Insta360’s imaging pipeline splits into two paths: on-device, constrained by compute power, uses small models or even traditional CV for basic needs; more advanced experiences are offloaded to Insta360’s cloud.

Meanwhile, Insta360 remains deliberate about Cameraman’s ultimate form.

“We won’t build a ‘final’ Cameraman product,” Qi Lu said. GO Ultra’s head mount and X6’s auto-tracking are stage-by-stage validations. “Product visions can’t be realized overnight; they must follow both technical and commercial logic.”

Six days before the launch, Liu Jingkang spoke at AGI Playground about a broader shift: future imaging devices will be “front-light, back-heavy,” with lightweight front-end recording and heavy lifting—editing, aesthetics, and delivery—handled by backend AI.

As stated in the 11th-anniversary letter to employees, “We once made cameras see more; now, we’ll make them move autonomously.” He defines Cameraman as “an intelligent agent that photographs by itself.”

In a WAIC dialogue, he repeatedly drew boundaries for AI: “AI is disruptive for sharing and commercial creation in imaging, but not for recording. The primal motive to record is that a moment is worth cherishing—this can’t be replaced by AI.”

This may be Insta360’s deepest moat in the AI era: generative AI can synthesize any image, but not “real memories that happened.”

Though 43% of Insta360’s internal code is now AI-generated and over half of customer service is AI-driven—efficiency is the organizational theme—the company still sells authentic moments belonging to each individual.

As Qi Lu said, the ideal camera should be invisible.

Over a decade, Insta360 has shifted competition from parameters to scenarios, from scenarios to data, and now to editing. It has done one thing: making cameras fade into the background and returning creation to the masses.