Relevant similar discussions are found here: Natron development status?
@Dominic_Stone_Kaiser wanted to possibly look into the code to contribute, and I seem to remember one more person with similar intentions, but can’t find anything. Whether or not that’s still the case today and whether money would help, I don’t know. In general the final argument usually was, that finding developers is the bigger problem then finding funding (though if there was a concrete funding available, maybe the finding a dev would be easier too).