NumPy built on Numeric which was primarily written by Jim Hugunin while he was a grad student at MIT. While I was a professor at BYU, I wrote the the core of NumPy with a lot of community input -- outside of my regular job. I sold a book "Guide to NumPy" for a while that I used to replace the grants I should have been writing and pay for a grad student to help write iterative solvers for SciPy. Chuck Harris joined the NumPy effort early and has been steadily contributing ever since without direct funding. Many others have contributed volunteer time since then.

A major reason I started Continuum was to help create places where people could get paid to write open-source. I am happy to say we have been doing this for 5 years though mostly outside core NumPy itself (Numba, Dask, Bokeh, conda, etc.) We are working to support many more open source projects more generally -- and our devs have now made additional contributions to NumPy itself. We have a thriving 40 person Community Innovation team at Continuum supporting many open source projects. I expect this funding to help bring more new people to the NumPy development ecosystem.

The community also started NumFOCUS at this same time to be a community-run foundation that could be a focal point for donations and support to projects including NumPy.

Nathaniel Smith wrote a great proposal and put the effort into securing this funding. It is real work to secure funding. I look forward to NumPy getting better for the benefit of all because of this work.