Tell us about your background and what motivated you to found Raspberry Pi. How would you describe the company in a nutshell?
My first computer was a BBC Micro—an 8-bit computer from the 1980s. There was one in every UK classroom. I had one at school, saved pocket money to buy my own, and grew up surrounded by programmable hardware. That led me into programming, then to Cambridge, where I studied physics, electrical engineering, and later computer science. Eventually, I taught there. By the mid-2000s, applications to study computer science at Cambridge had collapsed—from ten applicants per place in the 1990s to just two. We never admitted weak students, but the pipeline was shrinking. Raspberry Pi started in 2008 as a response. Kids in the 1990s and 2000s had powerful PCs and consoles, but not programmable machines like we had. We wanted to recreate that experience and founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a charity, to build a new programmable machine. It is still our largest shareholder, running teacher training, after-school clubs, free resources, and policy work.
I run Raspberry Pi Ltd, now a PLC after our IPO last year. Our affordable hardware continues to support education, with historical profits and proceeds from the IPO funding the Foundation. In the UK, computer science went from the easiest subject to get into at Cambridge to the hardest, with a 15:1 applicant ratio. That mission accomplished, the Foundation is now scaling globally—in North America, in Sub-Saharan Africa, and in India, where some states have three times as many primary schools as the UK. Commercially, 80% of our business today is industrial and embedded applications.
You have mentioned video games being a driver for early exposure to computers, but that shifted in the 1990s. How did this affect the pipeline?
Video games have often been the reason kids get hardware. In the 1980s, children bought Commodore 64s, Spectrums, BBC Micros, Apple IIs to play games—but those machines were programmable. In the 1990s, the center of gravity moved to consoles: Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, Xbox. These were powerful but closed systems, and the accidental pipeline of programmers shut off.
It is a delayed effect. You pour in eight-year-olds, they emerge as 18-year-olds ten years later. By 1996, when I arrived at Cambridge, the decline was already baked in—we just had not seen it yet. By the 2000s the drop was brutal, and it takes just as long to reverse. Raspberry Pi launched in 2012. A decade later, by 2020, the impact finally appeared in the statistics. The uptick is as sharp as the decline 20 years earlier.
With the Hailo AI collaboration, what innovations in education are helping children learn modern computing skills?
The risk is always teaching children how computers used to be, not what they are today. That is why the Hailo partnership matters. Raspberry Pi 5—our $50 product—is already a capable PC, about half the performance of this MacBook, but it has no AI acceleration. The AI HAT+ product, powered by Hailo silicon, lets you bolt on a $70 module to run AI workloads, whether recognizing sounds in the garden or other projects.
Preparing children means giving them modern tools. AI lowers barriers: you can ask it to analyze data instead of writing macros in Excel. For kids, relevance is everything. Most are not geeks like me; they need to see computers as problem-solving tools. AI reduces friction, more kids engage, and that is one reason for investing in these platforms.
Eighty percent of your business is industrial and embedded. Can you share some examples of applications and demand?
We break our business down into education and enthusiasts (20%) and industrial and embedded (80%). On the industrial side, Raspberry Pis are used in prototyping, test automation, production automation, and monitoring. Brompton, the UK bicycle maker, fills its factory with them for automation. In Brazil, a truck factory replaced paper manuals with Raspberry Pi-based build systems. These deployments are bottom-up: engineers buy Pis, prove ROI, and roll them out. Each project is small, but in aggregate it is a substantial market.
Embedded is even larger—customers building Raspberry Pi into their products. Schindler elevators run screens on Raspberry Pi. Heathrow Airport’s digital signage is powered by Raspberry Pi. These companies are brilliant in their fields—lifts, HVAC, displays—but they should not have to become computer companies to add intelligence to their products. We give them outsourced compute at scale. Outsourcing to us saves fixed and variable costs: even at 50,000 units a year, their cost structure cannot match ours at 5–10 million units. That is the heart of our value proposition to our embedded customers.
Why do customers choose Raspberry Pi over giants in the sector?
Simple: our products are faster, better, cheaper. What really sets us apart is vertical integration. We design semiconductor IP, some of the chips, the boards, the software, the documentation, the publishing, the community.
It is exactly what Apple does, just at a different scale—own the stack and optimize it. That is why the iPhone is good, and why our boards are cost-effective and high-performance.
No one else in this space integrates at that Apple-like level. That is how we win Heathrow or Schindler. For a given performance level, we are cheaper. Investors like it because it is explicable growth—not just luck, but the result of how we build and run the company.
What can we expect from Raspberry Pi over the next 12 to 24 months?
Like Apple, we are secretive. But the interesting journey is becoming a semiconductor company. We design chips to build better boards, but then we can also sell those chips separately. It is like Amazon: they built infrastructure to sell books, then sold AWS compute and storage. This year, for the first time, we expect to sell more chips than boards. They are 50-cent chips versus $50 boards, so financially small but strategically big. More than half of compute experiences with Raspberry Pi will be silicon, not board.
Over the next decade, we will probably become a company with co-equal electronics and semiconductor businesses. What motivates me are three things: education, still at the core with a well-resourced Foundation; engineering, because we have built an organization where people can do their life’s best work; and growth, because we are still on a journey to new places after 20 years. Once that stops, I will stop. But at the age of 47 I think I have another 15 years of work to do!
