More info here on Parity for everybody who is interested - https://ethcore.io/parity.html.
So Parity itself is an open source client, but ETHCORE are a for-profit corporation, who recently raised $750,000 USD in VC funding. See https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/ethcore-raises-financing-round-as-first-venture-capital-funded-ethereum-startup-1461343599.
Quote in that article, though not from ETHCORE themselves:
“Ethcore is much more focused on building licensed, proprietary tools for large financial institutions, exchanges, and so forth, as opposed to the more open-sourced, Red Hat approach Blockstream is taking ... One of Ethcore’s main value propositions is that they know Ethereum better than anyone, and thus the tools they build and deploy should buttress and catalyze Ethereum as a whole.”
@cseberino So while Gav was working at the Ethereum Foundation, he was working on the C++ client (which I now work on).
See: