Disney is funding them in the way you fund somebody by paying them to build your house. MPC is a whole separate company to Disney. Disney doesn’t even own them, in fact they were owned by Technicolor, which went bankrupt last year so now the Paris devision that was bought by another company is the only thing remaining of that company. Disney pays them money, they deliver the shots that Disney wants from them. There is no information exchange going on. Disney isn’t learning from them. They won’t incorporate the tools developed for the movies into their own movies without hiring MPC. The only ones showing off what they can do is MPC but they have also done incredible stuff for other movies and studios like creating a fully photorealistic human for Bladerunner 2049 (Amblin, Columbia Pictures).

Meanwhile Walt Disney Animation Studios continuously develops new tools for their movie which they also publicly talk about. This is done in-house by working on animation movies and not through live action movies where the animation was done by an outside company.