The Raspberry Pi Foundation was started in 2009 by David Braben, Jack Lang, Pete Lomas, Alan Mycroft, Robert Mullins, and Eben Upton who all sought to create a low-cost computer for the education market in the UK; this was intended to promote greater computer science literacy, as each of the founders had noticed a decline in basic programming skills for new computer science undergraduates. David Braben remains on the foundation’s board of directors, and Eben Upton has transitioned into the role of CEO for Raspberry Pi Trading ltd (the not-for-profit subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation responsible for producing the computers), where he is responsible for the overall hardware and software design of the Raspberry Pi computer platform. Prior to his work at the Raspberry Pi foundation, Upton worked as an application-specific integrated circuit architect for mobile computer chip manufacturer Broadcom, and before that he served as the Director of Studies in Computer Science at St. John’s College, Cambridge. The Raspberry Pi Foundation team is made up of over 100 employees with 50 managers ranging from business administration to educational programming design and implementation. Many of the education program managers are former teachers themselves with direct experience in the education system, and the Chief executives of the charitable foundation are Phillip Colligan (executive), David Warren (finance), and Sue Sentance (learning). The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also made their annual financial statements publicly available on their website, which I have included as figure 1 below; these show substantial growth in net funds (200% increase) from 2019 to 2020, which suggest both responsible financial management of the charity and increasing demand for Raspberry Pi Trading’s current computer products (“other trading activities” jumped 180% between 2019 and 2020) given the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK school system. This suggests that the Raspberry Pi platform certainly isn't some fad, quite the opposite, given the foundation's investment in education, partnering with them to provide students a personal computer for online learning means partnering with a company that has over a decade of experience manufacturing educational technology and teaching young minds how to use it effectively, which makes this a much safer venture.

Figure 1: 2020 Raspberry Pi Foundation statement of financial activities