Ollama Raises $65 Million, Reaches Nearly 9 Million Developers

Ollama, the company behind the popular tool for running language models locally on your own computer, has closed a $65 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Theory Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $88 million.

From Kitematic to Ollama

Ollama was founded in 2023 by Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang, who had previously worked on Docker Desktop after Docker acquired their earlier startup, Kitematic. Their experience building developer tools for managing containers translated directly into the new product, which works on a similar principle, except instead of containers it lets users download, manage, and run open language models.

Open models started showing up in 2023, but they were really hard to use - Jeff Morgan, CEO of Ollama

That line sums up the company's entire value proposition. Before Ollama existed, running an open source model meant manually configuring an environment and picking the right weights and parameters. Ollama reduced that to a single terminal command, opening up local models to developers with no machine learning background.

Business model

The tool itself remains free and open, but the company makes money through a cloud platform with three subscription tiers, from free up to $100 a month, billed according to GPU usage time. It's a familiar model from other open source developer tools: a free core product plus paid infrastructure for teams that need more compute than their own laptop can provide.

The company says it will use the new funds to grow the product and its open source community, expand its cloud compute capacity, and make key hires. With just 14 employees supporting a tool used by millions of developers, the engineering team remains remarkably lean for the project's scale.

Usage scale and regulated industries

The figures of 8.9 million monthly developers and presence at 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies show that running models locally is no longer a hobbyist niche. Among its customers, Ollama cites heavily regulated industries such as government, healthcare, and finance, where keeping data and the model on your own infrastructure instead of sending queries to an external API is sometimes a legal requirement rather than just a preference.

For Polish companies, that argument sounds familiar. Similar motivations, control over data and independence from foreign servers, are behind the development of domestic language models like Bielik and PLLuM. Tools like Ollama make it easier to deploy exactly these kinds of models locally, without having to build server infrastructure from scratch.

With 176,000 stars on GitHub, Ollama ranks among the most popular AI-related projects on the platform, and nearly 17,000 forks point to an active community of developers extending and adapting the code for their own needs. That community, alongside the product itself, was a key part of the investment case for Theory Ventures.

The round is part of a broader July boom in AI-related investment, in which, alongside Ollama, other companies building tools for developers and AI agents also raised funding. Unlike the massive multibillion-dollar rounds raised by the biggest model makers, Ollama's raise shows that capital is also flowing to smaller, specialized infrastructure tools.

Sources: Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users (techcrunch.com), Ollama Raises $65M Series B Funding to Grow Its Open Source AI Platform (hpcwire.com)