Probably. However you have to consider fields that are outside of the scope of commercial companies. Nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) is a good example. If you are referring to NPL than it is definitely true.
That's the free market at work I would guess. Zalando seems to see NLP research as a valuable asset so they pay for projects like this plus they open source it assumably because of employer branding. I don't see anything wrong with that.
In the case of Flair, research led to a reference implementation, which was then matured through internal use and open sourced to further mature it and get external feedback. While employer branding is a nice benefit, it is a positive side-effect, not the motivation in itself :)