Board leader: 10 million Raspberry Pi units sold and new kit launched

Raspberry Pi sold its 10 millionth unit last month, four years after its founders launched the tiny computer, expecting to sell only a few thousand. 

Writing on the company’s blog, one of the founders, Eben Upton, says “imagine how strange it feels” to announce having sold 10 million, and that the figure has “beaten our wildest dreams by three orders of magnitude”.

Raspberry Pi was originally started to provide encourage to more people to join the Computer Science courses at Cambridge University, UK. 

“At the time, we thought our lifetime volumes might amount to 10 thousand units – if we were lucky,” writes Upton.

“There was was no expectation that adults would use Raspberry Pi, no expectation of commercial success, and certainly no expectation that four years later we would be manufacturing tens of thousands of units a day in the UK, and exporting Raspberry Pi all over the world.”

The company has just launched a new starter kit, available in the UK through RS Components and element14 and priced at £99 + tax.

This is the first official kit Raspberry Pi has put together, and Upton says it will be available globally in the coming weeks.

Although Raspberry Pi started out as an educational device, it has found applications in many different industrial settings, including agriculture.

One project recently featured on this website showed how scientists have developed a system to help farmers manage better and more cheaply using Raspberry Pi.