Yes, only a couple of people, and originally as a sideproject. I met one of them in Cambridge, UK. They pivoted their `business-model' several times. Originally they wanted to sell hardware, but then became technically a licensor. (Somebody has probably written more about the history somewhere. What I know is from a talk given at a HN London meetup. The video might be online.)
This is one of the things I find fascinating about them, because the norm is to have some engineer say "We're gonna sell a bazillion" with no way of quantifying how they came up with that number. And it was also why I didn't think they would actually get into production at that price. But they did, and hey they might hit the bazillion unit mark :-)
Don't know if they have those, the Pi foundation is not a business! (Last I checked)
Not to mention, based on blog posts around the time they were in development, the org was only a couple people.