funding open source projects is hard - no one knows that better than we do. See this #ownCloud blog post years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404094655/https://owncloud.org/news/open-source-contribute-noncommercial/

Element received millions of VC funding, and is happily recommended all the time.
https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/27/element-raises-30-m-to-boost-matrix