The first thing that made Uvallanne possible was the adoptation of the all Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters in the Unicode standard. The hardest work was done by Klaas Ruppel (The Research Institute for the Languages of Finland). Also Erkki Kolehmainen, The Finnish representative in Unicode committee, Trond Trosterud from Norway, and Michael Everson from Ireland promoted strongly UPA proposals in the Unicode committee. Without Unicode support UPA would be very lame today. Toni Suutari (now in the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland; before in the Department of Finnish language of University of Helsinki) and Leena Huima (The Finno-Ugrian Society) are also significantly involved in this task.Sachiko Toguchi calculated skilfully the frequencies of UPA glyphs, which was necessary in developing the UPA keyboard layouts.
But at least as important factor were funds for ther development the OpenType font JLOT-Fluralic, which were provided by Department of Dynamic Linguistic of University of Tokyo, which established in 2003-2005 a project led by Kazuto Matsumurafor improvement of Unicode usage of minority languages in Russia. Uvallanne is made on the basis of JLOT-Fluralic. The font planning was a big technical and time consuming - in the beginning quite unsure - challenge, and it would not be done without these funds.
Both were necessary: all UPA characters in Unicode and making a font, that contain all these characters. As a commercial product a special font like Uvallanne would be impossible, because there are so few potential customers, and many of them are scientific institutions with quite limited financial resources.