Before you think of the money, maybe ask Nate what the technical requirements would be and whether he is in a position to fulfill them?
I think there could be scope for further development of NLP by tighter integration into Lightroom, so that more of Lightroom’s tools could work better on converted negatives, but this would require an ability to get into programming that goes considerably beyond what Nate can now do based on the Lightroom SDK. Nonetheless I have thought for some time that a form of closer technical collaboration between Nate Photographic and Adobe could be an attractive idea for all concerned.