I don't think this is very true. There hasn't been much private funding for NumPy. People working at private companies have worked sometimes on NumPy but very rarely as part of their full-time job.
You would obviously know better than I. I guess I considered employing people who were working on NumPy as "funding", but possibly not on the scale or with the focus of a specific grant. So many of the folks who do scientific computing with Python have gone through Enthought, it seems kinda like everyone has drawn a salary or contract work from there at some point. But, I guess a lot of the work at Enthought was focused on making the tools palatable to industry rather than the actual science side of things, and much of the math they're packaging came from the academic world.