The title is a little misleading. They raised $6 million from SignalFire (who also invested in Grammarly) for 5% of the company [1]. As SignalFire retains that shareholding, they are not less independent (nor more) than that have been in the past couple of years. They are just not looking for more investment and so are more "independent-minded".

I used SpaCy quite expensively pre-2020. It still has a lot of great uses, and more predictable than LLM models. But now many NLP tasks that seemed near impossible, or required a lot of expensive annotated training data (which their product Prodigy is used for) can now be coded in very little time with LLMs.

[1] https://explosion.ai/blog/weve-sold-5-percent-of-explosion