$4.7 million for a data validation library is hard to understand. Pydantic as it stands will hard to make a business model around. All the examples mentioned in the article are services, not libraries. And pydantic is not so extraordinary that it is very hard to imagine overcoming the inertia of paying for a library for it.

Also pydantic itself doesn't lead to any cloud service capability, so they will effectively start from scratch.

This and Astral (ruff) are similar. “hot” python frameworks, but unclear how they’ll monetize.

We are in a dev tools / libraries VC hype cycle. While we'd like to find sustainable ways to support open source, not everything needs a VC investment to distort alignment with users. We should find ways to support bootstrapped or lifestyle businesses. I'm curious why streamers and content creators can make a living but we do not tip OSS developers on the same way. Maybe it's about connecting with your community, which non devs do much better

pydantic had already been sponsored with tens thousands of dollars. It wasn't lacking sponsorship.

I agree with you that more sponsorship is needed, but I doubt the lack of it is what pushed pydantic to venture capital.