I assume there was a lot of work (read money) put in those collision attacks rather than it being discovered by accident. I'm wondering who is sponsoring this w

I assume there was a lot of work (read money) put in those collision attacks rather than it being discovered by accident. I'm wondering who is sponsoring this work and for what purpose? The argument about proving that an algorithm is broken and working on better cryptography wouldn't suffice in this case, as issues were shown before that. Here the purpose was to make the attack cheaper?