Source | YuanSight

As the handheld smart camera market becomes increasingly competitive, Insta360, renowned for its resilience under pressure, has decided to fully embrace AI-driven storytelling.

In August, Insta360 unveiled two new offerings: the panoramic camera Insta360 X6 and the gimbal camera Luna Pro. The company is now prioritizing differentiated experiences that go beyond mere hardware specifications, emphasizing AI-driven shooting, camera movement, editing, and content organization to tackle the longstanding challenge of "easy shooting but difficult editing" faced by action camera users.

This move represents Insta360's latest effort to bring its vision of smart imaging to life.

Liu Jingkang, the founder of Insta360, stated in his 2025 annual report letter to shareholders that the company's long-term technological ambition is to create a fully automated "photography robot" that can rival professional photographers. Over the past six years, Insta360 has honed its expertise in camera hardware, imaging algorithms, and robotic technologies such as drones and gimbals. The company will now concentrate on AI algorithm development and custom chip R&D to expedite the creation of an "AI brain."

From a market standpoint, Insta360 continues to lead the panoramic camera segment. According to IDC data, global panoramic camera shipments surged by over 50% year-on-year in Q1 2026, with Insta360 capturing over 68% of the market share. In the broader handheld smart camera market, Insta360 ranks second with a 22% share, marking a 66% year-on-year increase and making it the fastest-growing brand among the top players.

01

A Year of Significant Product Launches

2026 is undoubtedly a pivotal year for Insta360's product lineup.

After venturing into the drone market with the Avatar A1 panoramic drone in the latter half of last year, Insta360 continued its aggressive expansion into new product markets in the second half of this year.

On June 10, Insta360 introduced its first handheld gimbal camera, the Luna Ultra. It features a detachable remote control screen and sets a new standard with dual lenses and telephoto capabilities. Equipped with a dual-Leica optical lens system, it supports 8K video recording, up to 12x hybrid zoom, and 6x lossless zoom.

Source: Insta360 Store

Data indicates that on its launch day, the Luna Ultra topped sales charts across multiple e-commerce platforms, including securing the #1 spot in action camera sales on Douyin and JD.com, leading total sales on Tmall Live, and claiming the top position on Amazon's Best Seller list in the US.

While aggressively expanding, Insta360 also safeguarded its market position. Two months after the Luna Ultra's release, on August 12, the company updated its flagship panoramic camera series with the Insta360 X6. It boasts two 1/1.1-inch custom sensors co-developed with Sony, supporting 8K 50fps panoramic video and 120MP panoramic photos.

The new model retains the AI triple-chip design from its predecessor, the X5, with a 4nm Qualcomm chip providing 5x computational power and two custom professional imaging chips for noise reduction and image quality enhancement. By seamlessly integrating panoramic mode, gimbal mode 2.0, and planar video mode, it achieves a "three-in-one" functionality.

Notably, Insta360 also updated the single-lens Luna Pro, adjusting the starting price of its handheld gimbal products to RMB 3,399.

However, Insta360 has not engaged in price competition with its new products. The recently released X6 panoramic camera and Luna series gimbal cameras are priced several hundred yuan higher than competing products, demonstrating the company's intention to command a premium through differentiated functionality.

To date, Insta360 has completed updates to its dual-flagship lineup of "panoramic + gimbal" cameras, but this is just the beginning.

In early August, Liu Jingkang hinted on Weibo that on the first anniversary of the Avatar drone's release, Insta360 would redefine panoramic drones in the coming month, sparking speculation about new drone products. On July 28 last year, Insta360 launched the Avatar Antigravity panoramic drone brand and introduced the "world's first" panoramic drone, the Avatar A1, officially entering the drone industry.

Additionally, according to overseas photography media Photo Rumors, after two years, Insta360 is expected to update its action camera, the Insta360 Ace Pro 3, by the end of this year. The biggest highlight is upgrading the sensor from the previous 1/1.3-inch to a 1-inch large sensor, further enhancing color range and low-light performance.

Behind this intense product update pace lies the increasingly fierce competition in the mobile imaging market.

This year, several smartphone manufacturers, including Honor, OPPO, and vivo, have announced plans to launch handheld gimbal cameras.

Facing cross-industry competition from smartphone makers, Liu Jingkang admitted in an interview that most consumer electronics lack significant barriers, but brands can establish product thresholds by leveraging their lead time advantages. Judging by Insta360's recent product update pace, the company continues to explore unmet customer needs and technological innovation opportunities through comprehensive product line updates.

02

Is AI Video Editing a Profitable Venture?

As hardware specification competition becomes increasingly fierce, Insta360 is actively seeking new growth drivers beyond hardware, with AI-powered seamless editing as a key breakthrough.

Insta360 began investing in automatic editing technology as early as 2018, with its insta360 studio and insta360 App supporting varying degrees of automatic editing. However, the real turning point came this year.

In June, Insta360 and Amazon Web Services jointly launched "Moment Pro," a one-stop AI-powered intelligent video creation application based on large AI models and Agent technology. The app allows users to set video themes, atmospheres, styles, and time ranges using natural language, with AI selecting footage, designing narratives, and automatically generating videos based on these specifications.

Source: Insta360

Compared to previous automatic editing tools, "Moment Pro" incorporates Amazon's Agentic AI five-layer technology stack, enabling system-level automation across the entire process—from material retrieval, content understanding, structural arrangement, and music matching to automatic video generation—using multiple model layers. High-quality videos can be produced in under a minute.

Additionally, "Moment Pro" supports automatic connectivity with various Insta360 devices, including panoramic cameras, gimbal cameras, and drones, enabling one-click automatic video editing based on general footage while supporting the generation of multiple storylines with a single click.

In August, with the release of the Insta360 X6, Insta360 further shifted AI editing capabilities from the cloud to the device side. Its self-developed PanoMind panoramic AI multimodal model, trained on over 10,000 hours of specialized data across more than 30 scenarios, including travel, daily life, skiing, motorcycling, diving, and cycling, provides post-production capabilities to "understand, shoot, and create panoramic content."

Source: Insta360

Furthermore, the newly launched "AI Director" function supports automatic on-device editing, directly identifying highlight moments, assessing footage editability, generating virtual camera movement paths, and completing video production while charging.

Source: Insta360

Beyond AI-powered post-production editing, Insta360 is further exploring the potential of cameras as new AI hardware entry points.

Recently, the Insta360 GO Ultra thumb camera officially launched with an AI voice assistant named "Kira." In mainland China, it integrates Alibaba's QianWen large model, while overseas versions use Google Gemini. Centered on Insta360's self-developed technology and fused with QianWen's multimodal capabilities, Kira performs voiceprint recognition and intent judgment on the device side, while the cloud handles complex tasks like Q&A and translation. Liu Jingkang claimed this would "redefine thumb cameras" and predicted it might become the largest personal AI assistant in terms of inventory and shipments, second only to Meta's offerings.

From an AI strategy perspective, Insta360's ambition extends beyond merely stacking individual AI features.

A research report by Caitong Securities points out that on the software side, functions like AI Director and 3D Time Capsule continuously lower the creative barrier, with potential to explore value-added service monetization through Insta360 + cloud services and "Moment Pro," pushing the company from one-time hardware sales toward a "hardware + software services" model.

According to a report by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Liu Jingkang stated at the recent annual general meeting that software subscriptions and storage services may account for a larger share of revenue in the future. Currently, consumer habits for paying for AI imaging functions are still being cultivated, but as convenience improves, revenue from paid services is expected to increase.

More importantly, by enabling AI capabilities at the software and cloud services levels to further lower the barrier to hardware usage, Insta360 will enhance its competitiveness in the smart imaging market.

03

Increasing R&D Investment

To drive updates across its entire product line and implement AI technologies, Insta360 is ramping up R&D investment.

Tianyancha data shows that in 2025, Insta360's revenue reached RMB 9.741 billion, up 74.76% year-on-year, while net profit declined by 10.89% to RMB 886 million. In Q1 2026, revenue grew 83.11% year-on-year to RMB 2.481 billion, but net profit plummeted by 81.52% to RMB 32.58 million.

Source: Tianyancha

With fundamentals yet to improve, Insta360 is entering an "accumulation phase" for a new product cycle.

Financial data shows that in 2025, Insta360's R&D investment reached RMB 1.53 billion, nearly doubling year-on-year and exceeding the total of the previous three years. In Q1 2026, R&D spending rose to RMB 465 million, up 101% year-on-year, outpacing revenue growth and reflecting the company's proactive strategic layout in key technologies and new product categories.

Specifically, beyond its existing business investments, Insta360 is strategically investing in R&D for two drones (including the Avatar panoramic drone), handheld gimbal cameras, wireless lavalier microphones, and three other new categories, while custom-developing three chips.

Liu Jingkang believes that future industry competition will shift from hardware alone to an integrated capability of "hardware + software + data." Therefore, Insta360's market strategy remains focused on building barriers through proactive insights into customer needs, early strategic layout, and R&D investment.

From a market perspective, IDC estimates that the handheld smart camera market remains highly active across industrial capital, upstream and downstream supply chains, and end-user consumers. Multiple product lines are expected to see compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) exceeding 15% over the next five years. By 2030, the global handheld smart camera market is projected to surpass 40 million units, with an overall CAGR approaching 18%.

Regarding pricing, Liu Jingkang recently stated in media interviews that he does not pursue "vicious price wars."

He believes that Insta360 does not focus on the size of the existing market cake but on the number of unresolved problems. The future competition will hinge on the ability to anticipate customer needs in emerging categories, deploy required technologies earlier, and commercialize them sooner to create market leadership advantages.

It appears that Insta360's current strategy seeks to find differentiated selling points through technological investments in AI rather than engaging in direct price competition.

However, it is worth noting that Insta360's approach of sacrificing short-term profits for long-term performance and sustainable growth still faces some skepticism from the capital markets. Rebuilding investor confidence remains a challenge for the company as a newly listed entity.

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