Raspberry Pi's trading arm snags £33m investment as flotation rumours sink

The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has received a £33m investment – putting paid to rumours that the company was looking to float on the stock exchange as a means of funding growth. The Raspberry Pi project came to the public's attention back in 2011, and by the time the education-focused single-board computer …

[Gene Cash]

Whew

Going public is pretty much the end of any decent company.

[Tom 7]

"the list of investors "

is a phrase that worries me as it suggests handing of control/influence for money. Having said that I still see RPi institution as the best hope for the world for universal access to computation and access to the internet at an affordable price.

I'm not sure how much (if anything) Kindle lose on a reader but if we could have something like that with a keyboard and a Pi3 in it for around £100 I'd think we've pretty much cracked it.

[amacater]

Re: "the list of investors "

That was called OLPC :(

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: "the list of investors "

It's a £33m investment in a company (not the Foundation) valued at £300m, so a little over 10% of the company being "sold off" to two investors. Not sure is either will own enough to demand a Board seat, but one or both may get one anyway as part of bringing not just money, but experience.

[G R Goslin]

With the 'Sale' of shares.......

..... the words 'thin', 'edge; and 'wedge' come to my mind. A loan, can (conceivably) be paid back, but shares are forever. And presumably transferrable.

[Snowy]

Re: With the 'Sale' of shares.......

Shares can also be bought back.

[cyberdemon]

Re: With the 'Sale' of shares.......

Eben Uptono Good

[Nik 2]

Re: With the 'Sale' of shares.......

The note about 'sharing the vision' suggests that Raspi has considered who it is selling to, and will therefore have had a condition attached.

[ColonelDare]

I got worried...

.. when apt update started pinging Miicro$oft's servers.

Doesn't seem to do it now - maybe they realised they had frightened the horses?

[dharmOS]

Re: I got worried...

That was for the ARM version of Visual Studio Code (VSCode), which is an excellent choice of IDE. Certainly wish I had learnt to program on something like this rather than IDLE etc