There has to be more background to this? Why would they ever bother building the service if they have the 14M in cash?
It's imaginary money, still, or I'm sure they would cash out.
As for why they would take investors' money (not really investors according to the SEC) and actually build their product? Maybe they value keeping their promises, or their dream is to build this product and the $14mm is just a means to that end.
"Imaginary" in the sense that it's unrealized in the currency in which it's described, exchangeable only if there are enough people willing to pay the market rate at the moment. "Unrealized" may be better than "imaginary", that's a fair criticism. So it wasn't $14m USD, it was ETH whose market value at the time of calculating was potentially $14m.
To pay employees or themselves I'd also bet they cashed out a slice. I'd love to see a tracker for % of ETH raised at ICO and subsequently sold off. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent flash crash[1] was an ICO selloff.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-21/ethereum-flash-cras...