I think you’d be better off looking at the OCaml Foundation, which offers a fairly transparent framework for funding community projects through industry sponsors. In this case, you mentioned Owl, a project whose author has already begun discussions with the foundation.
I would agree with @Khady that an entire community doesn’t really need to be aligned to produce industrial software (and my opinion is that it shouldn’t). The OCaml community may be small, but it’s made up of high-quality people, which has led to the language already being used in industry — so there are already “business models” (and not necessarily from companies, either) that work.