$630 million Raspberry Pi IPO float could be just a week away - Report

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The countdown has apparently begun.

Raspberry Pi on a fictional stock tracker
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware / Pexels / OpenClipArt)

It has been no secret that Raspberry Pi LTD, the trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and maker of our favorite single board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is planning to float on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). According to city sources, this could be just a week away.  The source also claims that for several weeks Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton has been "sounding out investors" about the listing.

In a report featured in The Times on May 11, city sources indicated that the floatation could be within the next ten days. This means that we could see Raspberry Pi shares being publicly offered on the stock market from May 20. The report's source also cautions that a delay could occur due to deteriorating market conditions, which could allude to a shrinking UK stock market.

We reported back in January 2024 that Raspberry Pi had appointed Peel Hunt and Jefferies to help prepare Raspberry Pi LTD for an IPO (Initial Public Offer). The value of the IPO is estimated to be around £500 million ($630 million at the current exchange rate.) An IPO is where a private company sells shares to the public for the first time as a means to generate capital that can be reinvested into the business.

Back in January, we asked Upton if the IPO would have any influence over the direction of Raspberry Pi products and the business itself. Upton replied "I don't anticipate any changes to what Raspberry Pi Ltd does. Regardless, we're going to keep doing good engineering, designing the sorts of products we'd like to buy ourselves, and selling them to people (and companies) like us. Of course, the Foundation would be able to use any money raised to do what it does at an even larger scale, which would be a great outcome."

This isn't the first time that a Raspberry Pi IPO has been hinted at. Back in 2021, there were reports of a possible Spring 2022 listing, valuing Raspberry Pi at $493 million. That never happened, but between then and now, Raspberry Pi received investment from Arm Holdings Plc and Sony Group Corp. Sony has played a big part in Raspberry Pi's success. Sony provided the facilities in Pencoed, South Wales, where many Raspberry Pi boards are manufactured. It also plays a part in the official Raspberry Pi cameras and a recent Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W AI camera kit that was demoed at Embedded World.

With the IPO on the horizon, we're keen to see just how this all plays out for Raspberry Pi. 

Les Pounder
Les Pounder

Les Pounder is an associate editor at Tom's Hardware. He is a creative technologist and for seven years has created projects to educate and inspire minds both young and old. He has worked with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to write and deliver their teacher training program "Picademy".

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5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • peachpuff
    Can't wait for the $99 pi zero, gotta please the shareholders ya know 🙄
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I really hope they manage to improve the Pi's GPU more substantially. That's been lagging its competition almost since the launch of the first generation.

    Even better would be to make the GPU a dual-purpose block that could efficiently handle AI workloads. Given that the Pi also tends to trail on process node, this would make more sense than trying to have both a good GPU and adding a NPU block.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    peachpuff said:
    Can't wait for the $99 pi zero, gotta please the shareholders ya know 🙄
    Competition will help keep prices in check. Especially if you include the rapidly growing number of RISC-V -based devices.
    Reply
  • Blastomonas
    The valuation seems quite low. I'm sure that less deserving companies and products have floated for significantly more.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Blastomonas said:
    The valuation seems quite low. I'm sure that less deserving companies and products have floated for significantly more.
    While stock market valuations can indeed be quite wacky, keep in mind that the SoC in Raspberry Pi boards is designed by Broadcom using CPU core IP from ARM. So far, I think the only major IP that Raspberry Pi designed is the RP2040, which is just a microcontroller (also using core IP from ARM) that seems aimed at competing with Arduino. Anything beyond that is just the value of the brand.

    Another datapoint to consider is their sales volume, which I recall a recent article stating as 10M, over the company's lifetime. So, to sell about 1M/year of a fairly low-cost, low-margin hardware shouldn't drive a valuation in the $Billions. Maybe they're planning on selling services on top of that and trying to tap a much larger segment of the educational market.
    Reply