I hope so too for their backers sake. There is another dimension to this too that I thought of after my last post.

Their potential partners can be grouped into two categories. Companies that have produced phones before and companies that haven't but may claim related expertise. The former group are competitors to Purism and have a strong economic incentive to stop the commodification of the phone platform, esp for a relatively small payday. For the latter group, they would be essentially funding another company's R&D process. Imo it would be a fatal mistake to choose a fabricator that hasn't produced a phone before. It's so crazy that the latter idea should be dismissed entirely.