I haven't looked at the details of financing the ORCA project, but its current financing isn't all that important compared to the importance of the technology itself.
When it comes to planting more trees or doing direct carbon capture and storage (CCS), it's not an either/or situation. It's both. All the pathway scenarios that lead to maintaining a relatively safe climate involve planting a s$%t-load of trees and also developing direct CCS technologies.
We know how to plant trees, but the direct CCS technology part is really, really hard. It's harder than EVs and renewable energy. It's harder than sustainable low-carbon agriculture. It's harder than producing "green" concrete. CCS is probably the toughest challenge we've got.
Anything happening in the CCS space today is just an experiment. And these experiments need a LOT more funding. Because if we don't figure out how to do it economically, mankind could go extinct.