If you know of any grants that we could apply for or people with deep pockets that want to give money to open-source projects with no return then raising funds might work. The challenge is that LibreTime as a free software project with AGPLv3 really has a steep hill to climb to be financially sustainable. Especially since we aren’t the original copyright holders of a lot of the code. So anyone who wants to use LibreTime is free to do so, which is the intent. Figuring out how to get the various people who are using it to donate and sustain the project seems like the most logical step vs. seeking outside funders.
I think the idea of a big fund putting money into opensource communication technology sounds cool.
As far as specifically getting the software into “beta” that is really just a semantic call and the fact that people are using the software in production already makes it more or less a beta. I’ve spent time triaging issues for what could be fixed to call ourselves beta. But most new contributions have been towards features that people want vs. digging through old code fixing bugs that mostly affect new users of the software.