Perhaps, but keep in mind that you could make a crappy RISC-V chip (if you were an academic department) in a day just by bolting a new decoder onto some other RISC-y chip whereas the mill is "truly alien" (although alien in a way that is probably easier to make in some sense, in that a naive implementation wouldn't actually need all that much magic behind the scenes semantically at least, I suppose).

They did however seem to imply that they didn't even have FPGA models going maybe 5 years ago at this point which did seem pretty bizarre.

Perhaps it doesn't actually matter for what they're doing, but you'd think that they (in their supposed pursuit of seed money) would have a blinking LED or something just to have something to show off...