When you run npm update in the command prompt, when it is done it will recommend you type a new command called npm fund.

When you run npm fund it will list all the modules and packages you have installed that were created by companies or organizations that need money for their IT projects. You will see a list of webpages where you can send them money. So "funds" means "Angular packages you installed that could use some money from you as an option to help support their businesses".

It's basically a list of the modules you have that need contributions or donations of money to their projects and which list websites where you can enter a credit card to help pay for them.

npm decided to add a new command: npm fund that will provide more visibility to npm users on what dependencies are actively looking for ways to fund their work.

npm install will also show a single message at the end in order to let user aware that dependencies are looking for funding, it looks like this:

$ npm install
packages are looking for funding.
run `npm fund` for details.

Running npm fund <package> will open the url listed for that given package right in your browser.

For more details look here

First of all, try to support open source developers when you can, they invest quite a lot of their (free) time into these packages. But if you want to get rid of funding messages, you can configure NPM to turn these off. The command to do this is:

npm config set fund false --global

... or if you just want to turn it off for a particular project, run this in the project directory:

npm config set fund false 

For details why this was implemented, see @Stokely's and @ArunPratap's answers.