These VCs will not respect your privacy, in the long-term, even if the developers are 100% committed to it. I found this out the hard way. An open source instance that is committed to privacy would be ideal. But no one has resources and infrastructure to run it. Catch 22. In the end the VCs will take it all, and they know it. They are not charities.
Probably because SimpleX presented a good business model. They said they are woeking on offering dedicated messaging infrastructure for corporate clients. Global Village saw a potential that this business model might work and put some VC money in. Nothing out of the ordinary. Evgeny talks about this in a podcast episode with Seth for Privacy ( https://optoutpod.com/episodes/s3e02-simplexchat/ )
Discussion
In case you didn't listen to the podcast I mentioned above: Global Village does not make any decisions on operations of SimpleX or the other projects they fund. They just throw money at small projects that look somewhat promising and hope that in a few years that paid of.
No one is stopping you from running an instance yourself, in fact I run one myself DM me for connection string.
That's all very well, but how do you verify it? You cant. I have worked with VCs and trust oriented VCs. They will subtly control the choke points if something grows. When it comes to VCs adjacent a well meaning open source project, "Trust, but dont verify". Is not a good option. Running your own is a good option, but hard to get traction. That's all I was pointing out.