- Ollama raised a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures, taking total funding to $88 million.
- Just 14 employees run a platform Ollama says serves 8.9 million developers a month across 85% of the Fortune 500.
- The raise comes roughly a year after parts of the developer community accused Ollama of enshittification for pushing its paid cloud tier.
Ollama, the Palo Alto-based developer platform for open-weight AI models, has raised a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures. Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms and GTMFund also joined, bringing the company’s total funding to $88 million. The round follows a $15 million Series A that Benchmark’s Peter Fenton led; Fenton now sits on Ollama’s board.
14 people built the tool that, by its own count, 8.9 million developers open every month. That ratio, not the funding figure attached to it, is the real story behind Ollama‘s new round.
“Open models should be easy to run, easy to build with, and available wherever people need them — on your own machine, in the cloud, or both,” says Jeffrey Morgan, chief executive and co-founder of Ollama.
From Docker to open models
Morgan founded Ollama with Michael Chiang in 2023. The pair built Kitematic, a container-management tool Docker acquired in 2015 and later folded into Docker Desktop, now used by more than ten million developers daily, according to Benchmark’s Fenton.
Ollama runs a similar playbook for open-weight AI models: a developer downloads a model and runs it locally with one command. If the machine cannot handle a larger model, Ollama’s cloud takes over using the same setup, billed by GPU time rather than by token.
“Ollama started as an open-source project, and has since grown into a community of millions of developers. Everything we do next is in service of that community and their best work. The future of AI is open models running everywhere work gets done — and Ollama is here to power this shift,” says Morgan.
The open-model shift Morgan describes is a genuine market trend. The AI inference market was valued at roughly $97 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $254 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, growing at a compound annual rate of about 17.5%. As open-weight models from Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek narrow the gap with closed systems, more of that spending is shifting toward wherever developers choose to run those models, the position Ollama is chasing.
A crowded platform layer
Ollama says it now serves 8.9 million monthly developers, roughly double its count in January, and adds close to one million new installs a week. It also says more than 67,000 community-built integrations connect it to coding assistants and AI agents, and that it is used inside 85% of Fortune 500 companies, including regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance and government.
Those numbers put Ollama in competition with better-funded rivals. Hugging Face has raised more than $395 million and operates primarily as a model repository. Together AI recently raised $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation to expand cloud training and inference. Replicate offers a third model, hosting inference through simple APIs.
Ollama’s $88 million in total funding is a fraction of what its two closest comparables have raised, even as the company positions itself, in its own telling, as the largest developer network in the open-model ecosystem.
Theory Ventures general partner Tomasz Tunguz is betting on the latter.
“Every era of computing has had a platform layer that everything else plugs into. As open models close the gap for most real work, the platform where AI runs becomes one of the most valuable positions in software. That market is expanding fast: AI is making software creation more accessible, and every professional can now build their own workflows and tools. Jeff and Michael recognized that shift early on, and built Ollama to meet those people where they already work,” Tunguz says.
Growing pains behind the growth
The round follows real friction with Ollama’s own user base. About a year ago, developers criticised the company on blogs and social media for what they called the “enshittification” of a beloved open-source tool, arguing its paid cloud tier was pulling focus from the free desktop product.
Fenton, general partner at Benchmark, framed his continued backing in terms of Ollama’s founders rather than the product roadmap: “The Ollama team saw this inevitability early — and understood the needs it would create for developers looking to discover, experiment with, and ultimately run these models at scale. They’ve already attracted millions of builders, and this is still just the beginning.”
Ollama plans to use the new funding to expand its cloud infrastructure, grow its open-source developer community and make additional hires, though the company has not disclosed a specific headcount target, a valuation for this round or its revenue. That leaves the question hanging over the raise: whether Ollama converts a mostly free user base of 8.9 million into a paying one before a rival local runtime does it first.
