PyPy received an EU grant sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, although it had to be a different one. If I understood TFA correctly, NLnet is partially funded by this money? NLnet itself distributes money to very cool software things[1]—some moonshots such as Spectrum[2], some very down-to-earth and usable ones such as Nitrokey[3]. A discussion[4] linked in a neighbouring comment also mentions Sourcehut and Bcachefs.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

[2] https://spectrum-os.org/

[3] https://www.nitrokey.com/

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002044