Today, we’re proud to announce that Raspberry Pi has listed on the London Stock Exchange, as Raspberry Pi Holdings plc.
This is a watershed moment for Raspberry Pi, and the start of a new phase in our evolution: access to the public market will enable us to build more of the products you love, faster. And the money raised by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in the IPO will support its ambitions for global impact in its second decade; for more on what the IPO means for the Foundation, check out Philip’s blog post here.
A brief history of Raspberry Pi
Nearly sixteen years ago, in the autumn of 2008, a handful of us set off on this journey together. We were driven by a shared realisation that something had gone badly wrong in young people’s interaction with technology; a shared conviction that we should do something about it; and the beginnings of a shared idea of what that something might be.
In the years since, we’ve accomplished amazing things, as a company, as a Foundation, and as a broader movement. We’ve designed PCBs; written software; taped out chips; published magazines; filed patents; trained teachers; run after-school clubs; and seen our products taken to space, to the bottom of the ocean, and to the ends of the earth.
We’ve sold over sixty million low-cost, high-performance, general-purpose Raspberry Pi computers to the enthusiasts and educators who remain at the heart of the Raspberry Pi movement, and to the industrial and embedded customers who today account for over two-thirds of our sales.
And thanks to the availability and salience of those computers, and to the curriculum reform and teacher training initiatives championed by the Foundation, we have seen a resurgence in interest in computing among young people. In sixteen years, Computer Science has gone from being the easiest subject to get into at Cambridge to the hardest, a change that has been reflected across the UK higher education sector and beyond. We have engineers working for us today who got their first experience of computing on a Raspberry Pi platform.
Credits
Just like a major product launch, our IPO has been a whole-company effort.
I would like to thank the boards, employees, and contractors of Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and in particular the finance, communications, web, and transaction teams; our banks: Peel Hunt and Jefferies; our advisors: Linklaters, Grant Thornton, PwC, Deloitte, Swan Partners, and Alma; the London Stock Exchange, the FCA, the Charity Commission, and the UK Government; and our strategic, financial, and retail investors for the trust you have placed in us.
Special mentions go to Philip Colligan, Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO, fellow Welshman, and voice of reason in challenging times; and to Martin Hellawell, who joined us as non-executive chairman in 2019, and who has done more than anyone else to get us match-fit for the public market.
And of course, I’d like to thank my wife and co-founder Liz, who has been here since the start, and without whom nobody would have heard of Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi, the company and the Foundation, are dwarfed by the community that has grown up around us; and that community would not exist without Liz’s vision, and the team she has built.
It’s been an incredible journey so far. And while today is a remarkable day, it’s also in a very real sense just another day on that journey. There’s a lot more road ahead of us than there is behind.