Ollama Raises $65M Series B to Grow Its Open-Source AI Platform

Ollama, the open-source tool that lets developers run large language models locally on their own hardware, has raised a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures. The round brings Ollama's total funding to $88 million and lands as investors keep pouring money into open-source AI infrastructure and developer tools.

Participating in the round were Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, and GTMFund, alongside a group of notable angel investors: Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker), Aaron Katz (CEO of ClickHouse), Spencer Kimball (co-creator of GIMP and co-founder of Cockroach Labs), Quinn Slack (CEO of Amp), and Marianna Tessel (Cisco board member).

What Ollama Does

Ollama's pitch is simple: run an open-weight model with one command, entirely on your own machine, then scale up to larger models through Ollama's cloud when local hardware isn't enough. That "run LLM locally, scale to the cloud when needed" model has made it the default on-ramp for developers who want to experiment with open models without renting GPU time or shipping their data to a third-party API.

Cloud usage is billed by GPU time rather than by tokens — a pricing model the company says better reflects how developers actually work with open models, with subscription tiers ranging from free to $100 a month.

The Growth Numbers Behind the Round

Ollama says it now has 8.9 million monthly active developers, making it one of the largest developer networks in the open-model ecosystem. The project has also become an unlikely enterprise staple: Ollama says it's now used inside 85% of the Fortune 500, including regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and government — sectors that are typically the slowest to adopt open-source AI tooling.

On GitHub, the project has racked up roughly 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks since launching in 2023, with the broader ecosystem citing more than 67,000 integrations built on top of it.

Founders With a Familiar Playbook

Ollama was co-founded by Jeff Morgan (CEO) and Michael Chiang, who previously built Docker Desktop after their earlier startup, Kitematic, was acquired by Docker. That's not a coincidence — Ollama's whole premise is applying Docker-style "one command and it just works" simplicity to open-weight AI models.

"Open models started coming out in 2023 but they were really hard to use," Morgan told TechCrunch, explaining that the tooling at the time was built for researchers, not for working programmers who just wanted to ship something. Remarkably, Ollama has scaled to its current developer base with a team of just 14 employees.

Board member and Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who led Ollama's earlier $15 million Series A and joined its board, said the founders have a rare ability to build a product that reaches ubiquity among developers.

Not everyone in the open-source community is cheering, though — some longtime users have pushed back on Ollama's growing cloud business, arguing it pulls the project away from its open, local-first roots even as the core tool stays free.

Use of Funds

Ollama says the new capital will go toward three things: deepening investment in the product and its open-source developer community, scaling its cloud compute footprint to keep up with demand for larger hosted models, and hiring key roles as the 14-person team grows to support millions of users.

The Bigger Picture: Startup Funding in July 2026

Ollama's raise is part of a broader wave of AI infrastructure funding this month. In the same stretch of July, Prime Intellect raised $130M in a Series A led by Radical Ventures, Norm AI closed a $120M Series C led by Khosla Ventures for agentic compliance tooling, and Together AI brought in an $800M Series C. Separately, security vendor Keyfactor landed a $1 billion private equity round led by Summit Partners — one of the largest single checks of the month.

Year-to-date, startups in the U.S. have raised roughly $406 billion across more than 4,300 equity rounds in 2026, with capital increasingly concentrated in AI, fintech, and defense tech. The trend line investors keep pointing to: generic "AI wrapper" pitches are losing ground, while startups that can show real usage, differentiation, and a path to margin — like Ollama's near-9-million-developer footprint — are the ones closing the biggest rounds.