MIPS has also hitched it's horse to RISC-V now, and I am seeing a critical mass of talent and capital forming in that space.
Lots of companies had their own mips implementation, but still might use an implementation from mips-the-company because even if you have your own team, you probably don't want to implement every core size that you might need. But then for some reason lots of them switched to using ARM, within a few years (in some cases getting an architecture licence and keeping their CPU team).
It seems like RV has a more stable structure, as the foundation doesn't licence cores, so even if one or two of the implementors die it won't necessarily reflect on the viability of the ecosystem
You want to burn your initial capital on lawyers? This is MIPS we're talking about.