British tech firm Raspberry Pi lines up £500m float
British tech firm Raspberry Pi lines up £500m float
The Cambridge business sells cheap, credit-card-sized computers and was originally set up to help get children into coding
British computer business Raspberry Pi is finalising plans to float on the stock market this month in a transaction that could value it at up to £500 million.
The Cambridge-based business is best known for selling low-cost, credit-card-sized computers to help children learn to code.
The float could take place within the next ten days, according to City sources, although they cautioned that it could be delayed if market conditions deteriorate.
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Raspberry Pi’s figures for 2022, the latest accounts filed at Companies House, show it employed 94 staff and made $20 million of operating profit from $187 million of revenue.
If the flotation takes place, it would be the second attempt by Raspberry Pi to list on the market. Upton had aimed to float the company in London in 2021 but ditched the plan when stock markets were knocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Raspberry Pi was also hit by a worldwide shortage of semiconductor chips.
Upton, who works at the firm with his wife, Liz, revived talk of a listing last October when he said “when the markets are ready, we’ll be ready as well”. It is understood Raspberry Pi has been telling prospective investors that it can grow the company by selling more of its products to businesses and through international sales.
This is the path to enshitification.
Raspberry Bye
This was a company with (amongst a couple of other things) a positive goal around education for anyone interested, for the lowest economically feasible price
That's incompatible with capitalist shareholders
Oh, so this is why they put the hobbyists last in line when the 'shortage' happened. They prioritize companies to look better to the stock market. For some reason I thought they were non-profit but I guess if that was ever true it's not now. I have to imagine this won't be good for the average pi enjoyer.
They are both. There is a non profit foundation which funds the educational side and the main company which operates for a profit. I suspect the bulk of their revenue comes from the industrial side of things where the Pi makes a much better base than a lot of the half assed hacked together SBC's out in the market.
There have certainly been mis-steps asking the way but all in all I consider the Pi to be a British success story. I guess it remains to be seen how much of the valuation goes to the founders and employees and how much is invested into their next phase of growth.
Shame the UK isn't into nationalisation anymore could have had a real nice BBC micro 2.0 now it's just amstrad
I was interested in an Amstrad HiFi for retro reasons and tumbled down the rabbit hole. Alan Sugar conned an entire country.
Rip in price.
At least there are plenty of alternatives on the market already. When the enshittification takes hold, we'll still have options.
There are lots of SBCs out there but the difference really comes down to documentation and how upstreamable everything is. The Pi might not be perfect but it's a much more reliable design to build something with than many of the other options.
But what are the other options that aren’t from some random Chinese company? I tried a Beaglebone but it was so slow at a similar price point.
I've had good luck with a Rock64. Not sure about performance vs a pi, but it's running great as a magic mirror.
I've heard good things about Orange Pi too, though can't say I have one.
Looks like the RPi 5 I got a month ago will be my last...
On one hand, I’m a fan of the ESP32 as a challenge.
OTOH, sometimes you actually need a full fledged computer for your semi embedded task, and sometimes you just don’t want to (or can’t be seen to, from PR standpoint) support Beijing.
While arguments can be made either way about the prior para, from a biz POV, it’s pretty binary.
Would love to find similar platforms that don’t involve those concerns and might theoretically be commercializable by hackers, but I’m not aware of many.
Doesnt Broadcom own a majority stake or something?