Ollama Raises $65 Million to Advance Local AI

American startup Ollama, maker of the most popular tool for running large language models locally on personal computers, has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Theory Ventures, bringing the company's total funding raised since launch to $88 million.

The round comes as the tool's popularity among developers has surged. Ollama, run from the command line, lets users download, manage, and run open source models such as Llama, Mistral, and DeepSeek directly on their own hardware, without sending data to an external cloud.

From Kitematic to Docker Desktop

Ollama was founded by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang, who met in college and built their first company together, Kitematic, a graphical interface for Docker containers. Docker itself acquired Kitematic in 2015, and the project became the seed for Docker Desktop, a tool now used by more than ten million developers.

Ollama grew out of a similar philosophy to Kitematic: making something powerful simple to use. Instead of manually configuring an environment, GPU drivers, and model inference libraries, users type a single command and the model runs locally on their machine.

The Round and Investors

Alongside Theory Ventures, the Series B round included participation from Benchmark, which led the earlier $15 million Series A round, as well as 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, and GTMFund. The company's valuation was not disclosed.

The ability to create a product that becomes ubiquitous among developers is extremely rare - Peter Fenton, Benchmark

Fenton, who has sat on Ollama's board since the Series A round, compares the tool's adoption pace to the fastest-growing developer platforms of recent years.

Scale of Usage

According to the company's own figures, Ollama now has 8.9 million monthly active developers. The project's GitHub repository has 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks, and the tool has already been deployed by 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

The user base has doubled since January 2026, with roughly one million new installations added every week. Driving this growth is a team of just 14 people.

Open models started to emerge in 2023, but they were really hard to use. As a result, it was difficult to get them running and working properly - Jeff Morgan, CEO and co-founder of Ollama

What It Means for Developers

Morgan notes that the turning point came when open models became capable enough to handle agentic tasks, including coding. That is directly fueling demand for tools like Ollama, which let developers run models without relying on external APIs or paying cloud token costs.

For companies, this means the ability to keep sensitive code and data local, a requirement in regulated industries, including in Poland. The company plans to use the new funding to develop its product further, support the open source community, expand its cloud computing infrastructure, and grow its headcount.

Sources: TechCrunch (techcrunch.com), FinSMEs (finsmes.com), AIwire - HPCwire (hpcwire.com)