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tldr; you want to deliver a device that would more or less be the free-software world's answer to Apple/Android usability. And you don't have the resources or market to do it.

There was a lot of buzz around Bunnie's project to deliver a truly free-software laptop from the ground up, and the overwhelming support is very exciting. Still, look at the devices he offered at his crowdfunder:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/ko...

The only real laptop form-factor is a $5,000 novelty laptop made of wood. (I say novelty not because it isn't functional, but because it's more a work of art than anything that could serve as a model for production in numbers greater than ten.) I'm not dogging his wildly successful fundraiser. I'm saying there's a really good reason he employed those unusual designs in the other devices-- with nearly 3 times more money than his goal, even the molding for a hackable clamshell would have been prohibitively expensive. And that doesn't take into account things like Vivaldi's software integration for KDE plasma which is outside the scope of the Novena.

Moreover, if the Novena ships with all the specs and stretches it advertised in the crowdfunder then it is delivering real innovations like SDR, free-software 3d graphics acceleration and other goodies that are hard to get for the price. The final number in their crowdfunder is the testament to the market for that. What are the innovations of a Vivaldi tablet? If there are any (other than an attempt at Apple-type usability on a non-Apple/non-Android device), I don't know them. A non-android, underpowered tablet running an interfaced designed so that non-technical people who have never heard of free software can use it surely has miniscule demand.

Of course I hope I'm wrong, and I wish you luck on your reboot. If you're able to bring such a device to market I'll certainly buy one, just as I bought an x60 gluglug. (Which is running a very usable free-software OS, btw.) I love flashing my free software bios to gain > 2x battery life on an eight year-old refurbed machine. But I'm crazy like that, and I don't have nearly enough disposable income to build a business-plan around.

We could try to raise funds to pay for reverse engineering of the VPU in the Novena laptop -- if we could find skilled reverse engineers ready to take the job. Can you introduce me to any?

A quick search turns up this product description which points to the Freescale i.MX6Q specs.

Does anyone know what he means with "VPU"?

The GPU is a Vivante GC2000, which has been partially reverse engineered already; support is being added to etnaviv, which is a user-space driver -- the part connecting Mesa + Gallium to the kernel driver -- for the Vivante graphics cores (support older cores like the GC860 is good enough for everyday use). The kernel driver itself (galcore) is available under GPL, although it could use a cleanup. So there is no need to reverse engineer everything from scratch, but the etnaviv project could certainly use more contributors.

There is also a video decoding acceleration block in the i.MX6, but like all things H.264 that is likely a patent minefield, so I'm not sure it would be worth spending a lot of resources on reverse engineering that.