Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet. Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work.

Rome is able to raise VC funding because it's a product that doesn't exist yet. Babel has the key advantage that you can actually use it now to do real work. It's not unreasonable for the developers of a real, currently-existing product to want to be paid for the work that they're doing on it, rather than for some pie-in-the-sky business proposition.