The Raspberry Pi Foundation, the non-profit body behind the famous personal computer, has closed a $45m funding round.

The Raspberry Pi is a British single board computer that was originally designed as a teaching computer but is being used for other applications and has found popularity for a number of IoT use cases.

The funding round was led by London-based Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in the USA.

Founder Eben Upton is reported to have confirmed the investment by saying: “We are pleased to welcome Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust as our first outside shareholders to help us achieve the next steps in our growth. We are seeing strong demand from consumers as they use our PCs to access the internet for work and entertainment, and even faster growth from industrial companies globally as they design Raspberry Pi into their innovative IoT applications. This funding will enable us to scale to meet future demand.”

He said the new investors would add value to the firm’s strategy and help support its growth, but that they also understood the rationale and ethos of its business model, aimed at enabling access to hardware and software tools for everyone and delivering a consumer PC experience from only $35 as well as building partnerships with a growing range of OEMs across the world.

As of May this year, more than forty million Raspberry Pis had been sold, and most are made in Sony’s factory in Wales. Others are made in China and Japan.

Over the past 18 months, it has been developing a new format for its educational projects, designed to support young people who want to learn coding, whether at home or in a coding club, on their digital making journey. This led to it announcing this week new paths that focus on the Scratch language including a physical computing path, with a Python and a web development path coming soon, and more learning content in development.