No, they are trying to produce silicon. This is their explicit goal. They're just recently caught up in filing a lot of patents because of changes to patent law.
The goal of their first funding round was to create a patent portfolio; the second is earmarked for an FPGA implementation. Hard to do it the other way around, although to be honest FPGA dev kits are so cheap these days I don't know why this requires a funding round.
My understanding is that the cost of the FPGA implementation is about the cost of modifying the tooling that produces a Mill family member from a spec to produce Verilog as described in the 'Specification' talk https://millcomputing.com/docs/specification/
Depends on the size of the chip you are trying to model, once your chip exceeds a certain level of complexity FPGA modeling can get expensive really quickly.
I suppose at $10K each, buying enough Altera Stratix 10 boards for the team could start to add up.
I don't understand this either, they could cut some corners and implement most promising ideas early. I think they delved too deep and it became too complex and alien. I would be surprised if there will be an actual mill cpu as described in the talks. Maybe eventually something that incorporates some of the ideas will be built, but not the whole enchilada.