Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised the employees aren't making a buy out offer at this point. I'd love to own a reasonable fraction of the company I work for at that sort of price and would happily throw in some of my savings.
Pumping my savings into a struggling company so that when it eventually fails I'm not only unemployed but also out of savings? That's a concentration risk I wouldn't want to have if I were a MariaDB employee.
Companies not run by shareholders but employees are often unremarkable but do well in long term. From time to time family owned companies choose that path.