AI nerds think this British company is massively undervalued

James Titcomb

Sat, February 21, 2026 at 5:00 PM GMT+9 6 min read

Eben Upton was perhaps the last person at Raspberry Pi to realise that the company had become swept up in a meme stock trading frenzy.

The chief executive of the British microcomputer maker was on a half-term skiing holiday in California on Tuesday as shares in the company jumped by more than 40pc, driven by predictions that it would ride the artificial intelligence boom.

From his mountainside hotel room, Upton says: “I was asleep for the first six or seven hours, so it was funny to wake up to so many WhatsApp messages saying, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

“I picked the wrong week to travel.”

Cambridge-based Raspberry Pi makes circuit board-sized computers beloved by hobbyists and industrial companies. They cost as little as £3.70.

It has been one of only a handful of technology companies to list shares in Britain in recent years. When the company floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2024, it was seen as a vote of confidence in British markets.

Raspberry Pi floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2024 - Carlos Jasso/Bloomberg

Until last week, though, it had not proved a slam-dunk investment. The company has been forced to repeatedly raise prices amid a global spike in memory component prices and shares last month fell below the flotation price for the first time.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation, the charity behind the company, has also faced an existential question. It was set up to help children learn to code but the rise of AI tools has led to warnings that the art of programming will soon be automated away.

All that faded into the background this week, however.

Shares have climbed by as much as 94pc, valuing the company at more than £1bn, after social media traders seized on Raspberry Pi as a likely winner from the AI revolution.

The surge came after an X user named Serenity, a mainstay of the WallStreetBets forum, suggested that the company was a “fun trade idea”.

Today, most people buy Raspberry Pi computers for home-brew projects such as orchestrating smart homes or playing old video games – but internet enthusiasts had spent the last few weeks buying the company’s low-cost computer boards to run versions of OpenClaw, a viral AI assistant, and traders suggested this could lead to a boom in sales.

The surge carried echoes of the “meme stock” craze of 2020 and 2021, in which shares rapidly gained the attention of traders through social media discussion with investments motivated partly by fondness for the company itself rather than financial performance or potential.

GameStop, the American video games retailer, was the chief target of the phenomenon with shares rising from around $4 (£3) to $483 in a matter of weeks fuelled by pandemic lockdowns, the Reddit forum WallStreetBets and the trading app Robinhood.

Story Continues  

The company’s circuit board-sized computers are beloved by hobbyists - Raspberry Pi/PA

Upton is cautious about embracing the meme stock moniker.

“I don’t know if ‘meme stock’ is a slur or not,” he says.

He also suggests that the amateur traders who have backed the company may be more sophisticated than typically thought – and might understand the company better than the institutional investors who ordinarily make big moves.

“I think what’s happened is that things like this wake people up to the reality of what the platforms that we build are and what they get used for,” Upton says.

“There are a lot of people out there who have a very sophisticated understanding of what the platform can do. You do wonder whether those people might be a little bit better at attributing some value to some of the more bleeding edge capabilities.”

OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot, has fascinated the AI world in recent weeks.

A personal AI “agent” that can be contacted through WhatsApp and handle users’ emails and finances, the software has developed a cult following in Silicon Valley. Because the bot requires advanced computer access, experts recommend running it on a separate system – such as a Raspberry Pi.

OpenAI, the $850bn giant behind ChatGPT, hired Peter Steinberger, the developer of OpenClaw, earlier this week. Chinese developers have reconfigured the system to make it work on even Raspberry Pi’s cheapest computers.

Upton is a computer scientist by training. He started Raspberry Pi while working at the University of Cambridge’s computer lab amid concerns about a sharp drop-off in the number of students signing up for programming courses.

Until its flotation, the company was majority owned by the eponymous foundation, which currently has a 47pc stake and is devoted to teaching children how to code.

Eben Upton started Raspberry Pi while working at the University of Cambridge’s computer lab - David Rose for The Telegraph

The company remains largely staffed and guided by engineers.

Upton says many of them have been tinkering with OpenClaw around the company’s “Pi Towers” offices – although most of his own time has been spent seeking to secure supplies of memory chips, which are in short supply due to the data centre boom.

“This is the tragedy of Raspberry Pi, which is that I and my team have built the coolest toy in the world and I do not get to use it very much,” he says.

Staff at the company will be toasting its recent stock market surge, since around 80pc of employees own shares. Upton made a series of share purchases in the run-up to the recent stock spike and his stake in the company is currently worth around £10m.

The share price rise will give the Raspberry Pi Foundation more cash to put on coding clubs and give grants to develop young computer scientists.

While a boom in tinkerers buying up the company’s machines should be good news for Raspberry Pi’s mission of encouraging more people to get to grips with computer projects, AI’s rise has led to concerns that the company’s overarching goal of teaching kids to code could become redundant.

Advanced AI systems have become increasingly proficient at writing code in recent months, leading to fears of a bloodbath for programming jobs as computers take over the task.

Upton rejects the idea outright. He says that software developers are likely to become between 20pc and 30pc more productive – and at best, twice as productive – meaning humans will still be needed.

“Writing code is a very small part of the job of software engineering.”

However, he fears that warnings from Silicon Valley could put people off pursuing it as a career.

“If you have this narrative about this not being an important thing any more, it could undo the progress that the foundation has made over the last decade in helping people understand why this is important,” he says.

“[That narrative] doesn’t have to be true in order to do a huge amount of damage.”

AI might have made Raspberry Pi Britain’s hottest stock – but its boss hopes the technology is not enough to make the company’s entire purpose redundant.

Try full access to The Telegraph free today. Unlock their award-winning website and essential news app, plus useful tools and expert guides for your money, health and holidays.

Terms and Privacy Policy

Privacy Dashboard

More Info