A $35 computer went on sale at exactly 6:00 a.m. GMT on February 29, 2012, and within minutes it had knocked over the websites of two of the UK’s biggest electronics distributors. That chaos was the payoff for a project that had spent nearly four years moving quietly through prototypes in Cambridge, built not as a business idea but as a fix for a problem a handful of academics couldn’t stop noticing: fewer and fewer computer science applicants who actually knew how to program.
A Cambridge admissions problem
Eben Upton was an admissions tutor at St John’s College, Cambridge, in the mid-2000s, and part of that job meant reading the applications of teenagers hoping to study computer science. What he and his colleagues at the university’s Computer Laboratory kept seeing was a steady drop in both the number of applicants and how much hands-on programming experience they actually had. It was a sharp contrast to the generation before them, who’d grown up tinkering with 1980s home computers like the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum. Upton put it plainly in 2012: the lack of programmable hardware for children was undermining the supply of 18-year-olds who knew how to program, which was becoming a problem for universities and, eventually, for industry.
That observation, shared among Upton, fellow Cambridge Computer Lab figures Rob Mullins, Jack Lang, and Alan Mycroft, electronics manufacturing specialist Pete Lomas, and Elite creator David Braben of Frontier Developments, became the basis for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The six of them founded it in the autumn of 2008 and formally registered it as a charity in May 2009, based in the village of Caldecote just outside Cambridge. The goal was narrow at first: build a computer cheap enough that a school could hand one to every student, priced around what a textbook costs, and get kids experimenting with code and electronics the way the BBC Micro generation once had.
Four years of prototypes
Turning that idea into a working, sellable board took longer than anyone on the team expected. Early prototypes were built and rebuilt between 2008 and 2011, chasing a combination that barely existed yet: something powerful enough to be genuinely useful, cheap enough for a family to buy without a second thought, and simple enough for a teenager to plug in and start experimenting. Braben’s background in games gave the project an eye for what would actually excite kids. Lomas’s manufacturing experience gave it a path to something that could be built at scale instead of staying a one-off demo board.
Launch day, February 29, 2012
When the original Raspberry Pi Model B finally went on sale on leap day 2012, the Foundation released an initial batch of just 10,000 units through two retail partners, RS Components and Premier Farnell (trading as element14). Both retailers’ sites buckled almost immediately under the traffic, and reports from the day put pre-orders north of 100,000 before it was over. The Foundation’s own site went down too. What had been designed with a fairly local, fairly modest goal in mind, nudging Cambridge applications back up, had just been discovered by a global audience of makers, educators, and hobbyists who wanted a full Linux computer for $35.
The original batch was 10,000 boards. Demand on day one is generally put at over 100,000 pre-orders, enough to crash the ordering systems at both launch retailers within minutes.
Months-long waitlists followed, and the Foundation spent much of 2012 just trying to build enough boards to catch up with an audience it hadn’t planned for. The $25 Model A, a stripped-down version without Ethernet, arrived a bit later in that same wave of demand, for buyers who wanted the cheaper end of the lineup.
From one board to a family: Pi 2 through Pi 5
What started as a single board turned into a lineup refreshed roughly every couple of years since. The Raspberry Pi 2 arrived in February 2015 with a 900MHz quad-core processor and 1GB of RAM, a real jump from the original single-core design. The Raspberry Pi 3 followed in February 2016, moving to a 64-bit quad-core chip at 1.2GHz and building in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for the first time, no more USB dongles required. The 3B+ revision in 2018 pushed the clock speed to 1.4GHz and added Power over Ethernet support. The Raspberry Pi 4, released in June 2019, was a bigger leap again: a 1.5GHz quad-core Cortex-A72 chip, USB 3.0 ports, true Gigabit Ethernet, dual 4K display output, and RAM options that for the first time reached 8GB, enough that people started seriously considering it as a desktop replacement. The Raspberry Pi 5 followed in late 2023, with a 2.4GHz Cortex-A76 chip that Raspberry Pi’s own figures put at two to three times the CPU performance of the Pi 4, plus a PCIe lane for real SSD storage and RAM options up to 16GB. Pricing across the lineup climbed in late 2025 as a global DRAM shortage pushed component costs up industry-wide, a squeeze the company has described as temporary rather than a permanent repricing.
Splitting the mission: charity and company
Meeting that kind of demand meant the Foundation needed something it hadn’t built as a charity: a manufacturing and sales operation. In late 2012 it set up Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. as a commercial subsidiary to design, build, and sell the boards, while the Foundation itself stayed a registered educational charity focused on curriculum, teacher training, and outreach. Upton stepped off the Foundation’s board that December to run both the new company and the charity as CEO. By September 2013, Lance Howarth had taken over as the Foundation’s CEO so Upton could focus on the commercial side, and Philip Colligan succeeded Howarth in July 2015, a role he still holds. The split let profits from board sales fund the Foundation’s charitable work directly: between 2012 and 2024, the commercial arm contributed close to $50 million to the Foundation, on top of tens of millions more raised through philanthropy. The Foundation also grew its educational reach through acquisitions, folding in Code Club in 2015 and CoderDojo in 2017, both volunteer-run coding club networks for kids.
Going public: the 2024 IPO
In July 2024, the Foundation spun off its commercial subsidiary as Raspberry Pi Holdings plc and listed it on the London Stock Exchange, a rare bright spot for a market that had been losing UK-listed tech companies to bigger exchanges abroad. Shares priced at £2.80 on June 11, 2024, valuing the company at roughly £542 million, and jumped by around a third on their first day of trading. The listing raised £166 million overall. The Foundation sold down part of its stake, from about 77% to just over 49%, netting £136 million earmarked for an educational endowment while it remained the company’s largest shareholder. By that point, more than 60 million Raspberry Pi boards had shipped worldwide, a scale nobody filing that charity paperwork in Caldecote back in 2009 could have realistically planned for.
What began as an attempt to get more Cambridge teenagers comfortable with a command line ended up reshaping what a cheap, general-purpose computer could be used for. Classrooms were the original target, but makers, industrial engineers, and the self-hosting crowd all found their own uses for the board well outside that brief. If you’re curious what a Pi is actually good for in a homelab today, and where it falls short, we’ve covered that in detail in Raspberry Pi Homelab: What Actually Runs Well (and What Doesn’t).