Arm increases stake in Raspberry Pi which floats next month

The IPO is intended to raise £500m according to market watchers.

Raspberry Pi aims to raise around $40m from the issue of new shares and Arm says it will take $35m worth of those.

The Times newspaper today quotes Paul Williamson, a senior VP at Arm, praising Raspberry Pi’s foresight and global power in compute. He is quoted as saying: “Raspberry Pi’s solutions will continue to drive the adoption of high performance IoT devices. Following our strategic investment in the business last year we look forward to increasing our stake as Raspberry Pi steps into this new exciting chapter.”

Eben and Liz Upton were co-founders of the business which has revolutionised STEM education among young people around the world and have taken it to fresh heights internationally.

It’s hard to keep Arm out of the headlines: More sources globally have confirmed last week’s Business Weekly update that SoftBank, the Japanese company that bought Arm and retained a major shareholding following its New York float last September, is set to acquire Graphcore – anchored in Bristol with a Cambridge office – for around $500m.

Graphcore’s expertise could be harnessed to Arm’s power in AI when SoftBank completes the deal, creating a new global powerhouse with Cambridge and Bristol flagships.

A reliable source told Business Weekly recently that a deal to rescue financially struggling Graphcore was done a while ago and that its team had been working as part of Arm for several weeks – with engineers “even having Arm email addresses.”

The source added: “We heard three weeks ago that a deal had actually closed, but wasn’t announced for some reason. Then we heard that the deal wasn’t quite done and was being restructured; then we learned the buyer was SoftBank and not Arm.”

Arm opened a Bristol office in the back end of last year – on Graphcore’s doorstep – but chose not to issue an official release. Several engineering posts in Bristol were advertised by Arm.

Graphcore has significant Cambridge investors. A union of Arm and Graphcore AI capabilities is clearly a win-win – not least for SoftBank which lands a new entity worth five times more at its peak than the £500m it will pay to complete the deal. And which will target an AI chip market worth megabucks.