PeerLibrary has been predominantly bootstrapped from the very beginning without major funding. We have yet to receive any donations or backing from institutions. Thus far, this has not been an impedence on the development of the project because our startup costs are low. Our costs ranging from domain name registration, conference and travel costs are paid for by our own contributors.
We feel that raising funding for the project right now is not necessary because the costs are so minimal at the moment and fundraising could be a distraction from development. However, there are a few organizations that have been integral in providing support in other ways. The EECS department at UC Berkeley provided us with server infrastructure (a 4U box which is temporarily running the production stage of PeerLibrary). Aaron Culich, the infrastructure manager for EECS and vocal open access advocate was our liason to this resource. The Internet Archive expressed interest helping us with scanning publications and infrastructure for static file storage. Mendeley and CrossRef are also providing support in the form of publication metadata and entity resolution classification respectively.
PeerLibrary is an application that is the part of a larger movement in open access and free software. To this regard, we have built our application on other efforts (i.e. Meteor JS, Mozilla's PDF.js, Hypothes.is, eLife lens). In the process of developing PeerLibrary, we have also patched issues with the frameworks and dependencies that we were building on top of. I believe PeerLibrary's role should also be to contribute back to the community by pushing patch submissions upstream. Our contributors have also attended the many co-working meetups that Meteor holds in San Francisco to bring up issues and share new insights with the community.