Fraunhofer is an institution in Germany positioned between universities and the industry. They provide applied research and license it to companies.

For example mp3 was mainly developed there. They hold many patents in the field of audio and video coding which obviously fund parts of the organization.

More recently, they established a new audio codec for Bluetooth LE under proprietary license which in my opinion does not have any advantages over OPUS.

At the same time not all of the criticism is fair because they are not a patent troll and anticompetitive in their license agreements.