The issue is not only one of funding, but also of publicity - GPL code is great, but not profitable. For widespread adoption of a software, it needs to get enough publicity. A very large number of people will never even have heard of any of the most used GPL-licensed pieces of software floating around.
Without publicity, projects get less attention, fewer developers, users, revenue, etc.
If your goal is to rewrite your python code in C with minimal hassle, start thinking of objects as structs with functions attached to them. If you detach the functions from the structs, instead having them take structs as an argument, then you can obtain something which is C-like but likely very unoptimised.
Personally, I think I would steer you towards Rust or C++ instead - both can run just as quickly, but have more OOP features and modern features which may make moving easier. Learning C is still a very good thing to do, but I'm not sure this project would be the best project to do that with.