Shares of computing firm Raspberry Pi pop 31% in rare London market debut
A Raspberry Pi 2 Model B single-board computer.
Olly Curtis | Future Publishing | Future | Getty Images
Shares of Raspberry Pi on Tuesday were up 31% in morning trade, as the British computing startup seeks to raise some £166 million ($211.2 million) from its initial public offering.
Shares of Raspberry Pi begun “conditional dealing” on Tuesday with a full open trade due to begin on Friday. Shares rose to 390 pence after the firm, which makes tiny single-board computers, priced its shares at 280 pence apiece. The listing is seen as a rare win for London’s main stock exchange which has struggled to attract technology listings.
Based on the initial pricing of its shares, the company was valued at around £541.6 million.
The Raspberry Pi offering comprises 45.9 million ordinary shares sold by the company’s existing majority shareholder, Raspberry Pi Mid Co Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It also includes 2.13 million ordinary shares sold by other shareholders, along with 11.23 million freshly issued shares.
If there is more demand, a so-called overallotement option will allow the Raspberry Pi Foundation to issue another 4.6 million shares. If the overallotment option is exercised, the final offer size will be £178.9 million.
Raspberry CEO Eben Upton established the company in 2012 to make computing more accessible to young people. Its single board computers can be used to power a whole range of uses.
While it initially gained traction with hobbyists, the company says that 72% of its unit sales target the industrial market, where it is used, for example, in factories.
In 2023, Raspberry Pi posted revenues of $265.8 million, up 41% year-on-year from 2022.
A number of high-profile industry staples back the company, including Arm and Sony. Last year, Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, invested an undisclosed amount in the British startup.
While small relative to other tech firms, the Raspberry Pi IPO could breathe life into the struggling London bourse, which has been snubbed by technology firms in favor or listings in other parts of Europe, and particularly in the U.S.
Softbank-owned chip designer Arm, which is headquartered in the U.K., chose to list in the U.S last year.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he wants to integrate ChatGPT artificial intelligence capabilities into the travel platform but the software isn’t ready.
“The [software development kit] wasn’t quite robust enough for the things we want to do,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
Chesky said the company would “probably” want to integrate ChatGPT eventually.
Airbnb on Tuesday launched a series of new social features, such as direct messaging, to its platform. The update also included a personalized version of the company’s chatbot launched earlier this year that can cancel and change reservations for users in North America.
In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Chesky said that the OpenAI chatbot isn’t “quite ready” for integration with Airbnb. He said the model was made using 13 different chatbots and that Airbnb is depending heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen model.
Chesky, who is a close friend of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said it’s only the beginning of the AI revolution and he expects the technology to fuel a consumer app craze over the next few years.
“We’re all going to have to work together,” he said. “AI is going to lift up a lot of companies. If they want to vertically integrate every single thing, that’s going to be very, very difficult.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The company announced the cuts in a memo from its Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit and other product-related positions will be impacted.
Axios was first to report the cuts.
Meta has been aggressively investing in AI as it works to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google, pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and recruitment.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund and develop its massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana. The data center is expected to be large enough to cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in July.
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