I'm learning Phoenix so I've been on their website a bit lately. I believe Dockyard (the company with an ad on the bottom of Phoenix's site) is supporting the project.
DockYard indeed supports the project. I work there full-time, primarily on Phoenix development (I'm the creator). We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without their support, so I welcome the trend of companies supporting the OSS projects they use.
Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets.