Raspberry Pi has shipped more than 60 million units of its credit card-sized computers, ranking third in computing history behind only the PC and Mac. The company's 2024 IPO valued the $1.5 billion industrial business—a commercial subsidiary spun from the Raspberry Pi Foundation—as a hardware backbone for edge AI processing.
The product line spans from the $10 Pi Zero to the $205 Pi 5, which delivers desktop-class performance. Paired with a roughly $100 neural network accelerator, a Pi can run small language models locally, positioning the company as a key enabler for distributed AI inference at the device level.
Yet founder and CEO Eben Upton is skeptical of AI evangelism. He said people overestimate what current AI tools can accomplish and reject predictions that the technology will eliminate vast numbers of computing jobs or discourage young people from pursuing tech careers.
Upton created the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2008 after observing a crisis in computer science education. As director of studies at the University of Cambridge in 2004, he noticed that CS had become the easiest subject to enter but applicant numbers were falling. Young people no longer grew up with programmable computers the way his generation had with machines like the Acorn microcomputer.
His bet was simple: make computing accessible and affordable. In 2012, he launched the first Raspberry Pi at $25, booting directly to a Linux desktop. The device sold 100,000 units on day one and reached one million sales within two years.
That educational mission remains central to the company's commercial strategy as it navigates the edge AI market.
