Yes, that's when it started. Then we sent some people to Juliacon '23 to get a feel for the future. Julia is a fine language, just not for us given the reasons in the OP.
We have been tracking mojo since 2020 but wanted to wait for a release date before making the change. Dr Lattner has a reputation of producing commercial quality work and we trust that. Also, because our code base is modular by design ( Dr Jim Gray was our mentor), and bound together by ipms ( any transport will do), we can make the conversion very quickly. As to funding it's mostly us. We have done reasonably well in financial trading augmentation approaches and so the funding is internal. We love writing small personal scripts in any language and much of our work product has been small and reactive, I suppose you could call them scipts. I would point out that NONE of this is relevant to my OP question.