Eric shared some of his thoughts shortly after announcing Alphabet at Stanford's Technology-enabled Blitzscaling class if you're interested in some of the motivation and types of problems they're trying to solve with it [0]
I think today it's more useful to think of most software as a living organism interacting with it's environment - it's constantly evolving and adapting to external changes (user needs, dependencies, 3rd party services etc.).
You could start charging a subscription fee for the service. This should help you find out very quickly how much people are willing to spend and therefore how much value your service adds. You don't necessarily need funding from a third party if your project is self-sustaining. Give it a shot and you might be surprised.