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Turns out COVID-19 lockdowns have been good for the inner hobby of hardware hacking: UK-based founder behind the low-cost microprocessor Raspberry Pi announced the close of a round yesterday table of $ 45 million.
The injection of money into the commercial arm of the Foundational Raspberry Pi (non-profit) puts it at $ 500 million (pre-money), confirmed founder Eben Upton.
The fundraising round was led by London-based Lansdowne Partners and The Ezrah Charitable Trust, a private US-based charitable foundation.
“We are delighted to welcome Lansdowne Partners and The Ezrah Charitable Trust as first outside shareholders to help us take the next steps in our growth,” Upton said in a statement. “We are seeing strong demand from consumers as they use our PCs to access the Internet for work and entertainment, and even faster growth from industrial companies around the world as they design Raspberry Pi in their innovative IoT applications. This funding will allow us to evolve to meet future demand.
“Our new investors will not only add value to our strategy and help support our growth, but they will also understand the rationale and ethics of our business model, aimed at enabling access to hardware and software tools for everyone and to offer a consumer PC experience starting at just $ 35 as well as partnering with a growing number of OEMs around the world.
The Pi Foundation said the funding would be used to expand what is already a huge lineup of Pi microprocessors.
Marketing spending is also planned, both in the consumer (“build-it-yourself” PC) and industrial (IoT) sectors.
Its commercial arm currently ships more than 7 million devices per year.
While in total, the Pi Foundation also said it ships over 42 million PCs (powered by Pi) to over 100 countries.
“We have certainly seen increased interest in Raspberry Pi during the lockdown,” Upton told TechCrunch. “It was satisfying to be able to provide units for young people who needed home study machines, and we had great philanthropic support (especially from the Bloomfield Trust) to roll out kits to underprivileged young people in the UK.”
“Our current sustained increase in demand is primarily driven by industrial customers as the economy rebounds after COVID-19,” he added.
“In the short term, the focus is on investing in manufacturing and the supply chain to meet demand,” he also said, developing the financing plan. “In the longer term, this funding will allow us to invest more in product development: as our products become more sophisticated, they become much more expensive and take a long time to develop, so we can hire more. engineers is a key factor. of future growth.
Commenting in a supporting statement, Peter Davies of Lansdowne Partners, added, “We are very excited to invest with Raspberry Pi, an organization that we have followed and admired for many years. The business and human impact it has achieved in its first decade has been extraordinary and we look forward to helping the company expand it even further in the years to come as new capital is deployed. “
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