[actually on the Cforall team] Huawei has funded the project for the past couple years, the web server is just our university research group's web host, which we didn't expect to get this much traffic on (it wasn't one of us who put this page on HN). We've been running fairly low-profile for the moment, but should make a beta release later this summer.
IIRC [not the team lead] they approached us when they were looking for modernization options for their existing C codebases. From there it went through the usual university-corporate research partnership process.