The News: Raspberry Pi is getting new funding from Arm, which is acquiring a minority stake in Raspberry Pi to expand a partnership between the two companies that aims to dive more deeply into working with the IoT developer community. Read more about Arm’s investment in Raspberry Pi on the Arm Newsroom website.

Raspberry Pi Gets a Strategic IoT Investment from Arm

Analyst Take: Raspberry Pi’s latest investment from Arm is great news for the IoT developer community as Arm bumps up these efforts with a minority stake in the organization. Arm and Raspberry Pi began their partnership back in 2008 and have watched Raspberry Pi grow from a project that was aimed at the education market to one that also now includes production-ready, low-cost, and powerful hardware for industrial and IoT uses. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

For Arm, I believe this move is smart because the powerful simplicity and small physical formats of the Raspberry Pi platform are perfect for IoT hardware use across a wide range of devices.

This announcement is especially notable due to the huge expansion of the edge computing marketplace as more and more devices at the edge are being designed and built to connect with networks and provide critical new functions around the world. Arm’s experience in chip design and architecture combined with Raspberry Pi’s flexible and innovative hardware is a great combination that can bring broad new capabilities and possibilities to IoT developers to fuel their imaginations and bring additional new concepts and products to market.

I am excited by this new investment from fabless semiconductor and software design vendor Arm because I believe it shows Arm’s vision in working much more closely with Raspberry Pi to deliver additional design and component options for IoT developers as they are creating their next devices.

Arm’s latest investment in Raspberry Pi follows the company’s move in July to invest money to fight the global semiconductor skills shortage by helping to create a new Semiconductor Education Alliance. The Alliance aims to find and train the next generations of skilled semiconductor workers so that there are enough skilled workers to imagine and design the next computing, IoT, and other devices using hardware from Raspberry Pi and other hardware makers.

Together, these strategic initiatives and investments from Arm provide graphic evidence of the company’s growing commitment to driving more opportunities for Arm’s business while providing more opportunities for Raspberry Pi’s hardware, software, and industrial use cases. This alliance of the goals of both operations is smart and I believe that Arm’s support gives weight to the arrangement in the eyes of the IoT development community.

Raspberry Pi and IoT Opportunities

Raspberry Pi is a nonprofit that began in 2012 to engage schoolchildren in exploring computers, code writing, science, and technology by making small, powerful, inexpensive, and flexible hardware available to the masses. Today, Raspberry Pi also makes its products and technologies available for IOT and industrial users to fill needs in a broader range of computing niches.

Raspberry Pi’s most recent flagship version, Raspberry Pi 5, launched at the end of October.

For industry and IT, the new strategic investment in Raspberry Pi from Arm will, I believe, unleash more possibilities for IoT developers and others to incorporate Raspberry Pi’s hardware and software built on Arm in their next innovations.

I also think it is a smart strategy because the continuing expansion of IoT in industry, for consumers, in telecom, and more shows the great potential for further growth in this marketplace.

In the press release about the new investment, Paul Williamson, the senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s IoT business, said that the rapid growth of edge and endpoint AI applications shows the importance of platforms such as Raspberry Pi in driving the adoption of high-performance IoT devices globally. “This strategic investment is further proof of our continued commitment to the developer community and to our partnership with Raspberry Pi,” said Williamson.

In my view, it will be fascinating to watch how this expanded investment in Raspberry Pi by Arm plays out in the future. I am looking forward with excitement to how this investment will power both organizations to greater things.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.

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