source: techcrunch ai: popular open source ai developer tool ollama raises $65m, grows to nearly 9m users
level: business
ollama, a tool that helps developers run open-weight ai models on their own computers, has raised $65 million in series b funding led by theory ventures. the company now has 8.9 million monthly active developers and is used in 85% of fortune 500 firms. it was founded by jeff morgan and michael chiang, who previously built docker desktop. ollama launched in 2023 to simplify using open models, which were hard to set up at the time.
the startup offers a free desktop app and paid cloud tiers for larger models that cannot run locally. pricing is based on gpu time rather than token limits. morgan says the business gained traction when open models became capable of agentic tasks like coding. board member peter fenton of benchmark argues that enterprises are increasingly adopting open-weight models to reduce inference costs, though closed models will still have a role.
ollama is part of a wave of open source ai projects turning into venture-backed companies, alongside inference providers like vllm and sglang. some developers have criticized the shift toward a cloud business, but morgan says it extends the mission by providing compute for models too big for local machines. fenton adds that the free desktop product remains unchanged.
why it matters: ollama's growth shows how open-weight models are becoming practical for everyday development, reducing reliance on expensive closed apis.
source: techcrunch ai: popular open source ai developer tool ollama raises $65m, grows to nearly 9m users