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4d ago

Ollama Raises $65 Million Series B to Scale Local AI Tooling

The investment signals investor belief that pairing a free local developer app with a paid cloud can make open-weight models practical for production.

Ollama founders Jeff Morgan (left) and Michael Chiang (right)
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Ollama

Overview

  • Ollama announced the $65 million Series B on Thursday, bringing total disclosed fundraising to $88 million.
  • The company says its free desktop tool is used by about 8.9 million developers monthly and appears in 85% of the Fortune 500, and its GitHub repo has roughly 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks.
  • Ollama combines a local CLI and prepackaged model library with a paid neocloud for models too large to run on consumer hardware and bills usage by GPU time rather than tokens.
  • Reports differ on who led the new round, with TechCrunch citing Theory Venture and Crypto Briefing naming Benchmark, and the company has not disclosed revenue or valuation.
  • The founders’ Docker Desktop background and the rise of capable open models since 2023, including the OpenClaw agent wave, help explain why developers, enterprises, and on-chain projects such as Shinkai are adopting Ollama and why this could lower inference cost, reduce latency, and keep more data on-device.