Raspberry Pi's trading arm snags £33m investment as flotation rumours sink

Updated The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has received a £33m investment – putting paid to rumours that the company was looking to float on the stock exchange as a means of funding growth.

The Raspberry Pi project came to the public's attention back in 2011, and by the time the education-focused single-board computer entered mass production a year later demand was high – so high that its initial production run of 10,000 units sold out in seconds.

In the years since, the project has gone from strength to strength with increasingly powerful successor devices, a recent foray into microcontrollers designed by its in-house integrated circuit team, variants designed for embedding, and even its first consumer product, the Raspberry Pi 400, which packs the company's single-board computer tech into a keyboard chassis named for Atari's famous family of eight-bit microcomputers.

Earlier this year, a report claimed that Raspberry Pi was to float on the stock market with a £300m valuation – a suggestion co-founder Eben Upton gently dismissed as being a simple chat with unnamed advisors about "how we might fund the future growth of the business" that had been "over-interpreted" by the media.

Now the meat behind the sizzle has been revealed: a report in The Telegraph confirming the sale of stakes in the company to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust – providing $45m (around £33m) in funding without needing to go public.

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The investment puts the company at a valuation of around $500m (around £366m), slightly higher than its previously suggested worth, but a potential bargain given the company's high profile and sales on track to exceed 40 million units across its product range – boosted by increased demand during pandemic lockdown periods and units which have made their way to the International Space Station.

Lansdowne Partners' presence in the list of investors is less surprising than Ezrah Charitable Trust. The latter was founded by former Goldman Sachs vice-president and Farallon Capital Management partner David Cohen in 2016 to focus "on the poorest of the poor, especially in Africa" – an indicator that it may be the work of the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation that was of interest.

According to executive director Kevin L Miller's LinkedIn profile, Ezrah Charitable Trust remains "dedicated to serving people burdened by poverty by providing catalytic support to our high-impact implementing partners" – among which Raspberry Pi can now be counted.

Which isn't to say there isn't cash on the table while the charity works to improve access to computing for all. The foundation's 2020 financials [PDF] showed a total group income of over £95.8m, nearly double the £49.5m it reported in 2019.

"The commercial and human impact [Raspberry Pi] has achieved in its first decade has been extraordinary," Peter Davies, Lansdowne partner and head of developed markets strategy, claimed in a statement to press on the investment, "and we look forward to assisting the company to expand this even further in coming years as new capital is deployed."

Neither Raspberry Pi nor Ezrah Charitable Trust responded to requests for comment in time for publication.

Updated at 15.10 BST on 21 September 2021 to add:

Raspbery Pi CEO Eben Upton sent us a statement:

"We're very pleased to have been able to put this funding round together: we have two very smart new shareholders who share our vision for where Raspberry Pi can go in the future.

"In the short term this is going to let us invest more in supply chain to service all the new customers who are coming out of the woodwork as the economy rebounds. In the medium-to-long term it will give us the capacity to hire more engineers to design more exciting products. Going to be a fun few years." ®