The largest global platform connecting developers with open models announces $88M in total funding
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ollama, the largest developer platform for open models, today announced a $65M Series B funding round led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, GTMFund, and other investors and angels. The round brings Ollama's total funding to $88M. Benchmark led Ollama's Series A, with Peter Fenton joining the board.
Ollama makes open models effortless to use. With one command, developers can run an open model and put it to work locally on their own hardware, then scale to larger, more powerful open models in Ollama's cloud. That simplicity is why 8.9 million developers have made Ollama the largest developer network in the open model ecosystem, with over 67,000 integrations. Ollama is used within 85% of the Fortune 500, including customers in deeply regulated industries such as government, healthcare, and finance.
“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," said Jeffrey Morgan, CEO and Co-Founder of Ollama. “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.”
How Ollama works
- Start local, scale in the cloud. Ollama provides the choice between local and cloud with no change in experience. If the machine is powerful enough, the model runs locally; if not, Ollama’s cloud offers the same experience, no configuration change, no new account, no new API to wire up. This dramatically reduces the per-token costs of AI for quick, low-latency tasks and more demanding, resource-intensive work alike.
- Privacy. Ollama does not train on user data, and when running locally, data never leaves the user's own machine. This enables use in regulated industries and allows businesses to entrust Ollama with their data even when accessing larger models in the cloud.
- Integrations. Ollama connects to the tools developers already use, with more than 67,000 integrations built by the community on GitHub: coding agents, personal assistants, document workflows, and much more.
- Partnerships and early access. Ollama is a distribution and early-access partner for the large majority of open model labs, including Meta, Google DeepMind, Mistral, and MiniMax, and for hardware companies including NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Ollama users get day-zero access to new models and faster performance through deep hardware integration.
"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," said Tomasz Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures. “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."
Customers
Ollama's growth has been explosive: usage has doubled since January to 8.9 million developers, and the platform continues to add almost one million new installs per week.
Many Ollama users are professional developers using open models for coding or running agents for daily task automation, with adoption expanding into teams as the default open-model layer: cost-effective, privacy-compliant, and already integrated into the tools they use.
“Open-weight models will generate the supermajority of tokens within the next 18 to 24 months,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark. “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 will continue investing in its product and open-source developer community, scale its cloud compute footprint, and bring on key hires. For more information, or to access and run open models, visit ollama.com.
About Ollama
Ollama is the easiest way for developers to get up and running with open models. Ollama makes open models easy, efficient, and safe to use, whether they run locally on a user's own device or in Ollama’s cloud, and plugs them directly into the tools developers already work with. With 8.9 million monthly active developers, more than 67,000 community-built integrations, and partnerships with every major model lab and hardware vendor, Ollama is the largest developer network in the open model ecosystem. Founded by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang, Ollama has raised $88M in funding from Benchmark, Theory Ventures, and others. For more information, visit ollama.com.
