Actually, I work full-time for Google Research (and have written all of the plop code, so far). Google happens to have sponsored a bunch of summer-of-code students through opencog.org, one of whom I supervised, but he coded in C++.

I think that the idea of a Lisp system that learns Lisp programs via probabilistic modeling is intrinsically interesting regardless of who funds it, but that could be personal bias ;->.