It's an experiment to learn about what kinds of panels work best, and about beaming power in general.

New technology, especially when it comes out of a lab in an academic setting, is never commercially viable. That often takes years of refining based on lessons from the lab, and from "real" deployments that aren't profitable.

Someone must see a path to being profitable one day or they wouldn't be funding research into it...

Some might be looking for funding to do rocket launches, without caring if the payload they are promoting makes any sense.

From the article, the primary funding is from someone who got excited by the idea when he was much younger. I sincerely doubt he expects to make his $100 million back.

It's a demonstrator, trying to verify that the technology can work at all. The real version would be sent out to an orbit where there is always a direct path to the sun, but sending out spacecraft that far is much more expensive than just shooting them up to LEO.

But at those higher orbits, the size of the antenna necessary to get sufficient directionality gets waaaaaay bigger right?

There's lots of space up there though.

Launch cost scales with orbital distance.

Yeah, and I presume this is one of the reasons they've chosen LEO. To cut costs of the experiment.