Ollama raises $65M and says it now has nearly 9M monthly users

In short: Ollama, a tool that helps people run AI models on their own computers, raised $65 million and says it now has nearly 9 million monthly users.

What happened

Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B funding round, according to its founder and CEO, Jeff Morgan. Theory Venture led the round. The company previously raised $15 million in a Series A, bringing its total funding to $88 million.

Ollama launched in 2023 and is popular with software developers. It helps them run “open-weight” AI models on a personal computer, often in minutes. Open-weight means the model is shared in a way that lets others run it themselves, like getting a recipe you can cook at home instead of ordering takeout.

The company also sells subscriptions for access to larger models it hosts online, with plans ranging from free to $100 per month. It charges based on GPU time, which is a measure of how long the computer’s graphics chip (a part that can do heavy math fast) is used.

Morgan said Ollama is used by over 8.9 million developers every month and is present in 85% of Fortune 500 companies. He also said the company has 14 employees. On GitHub, a site where programmers share code, Ollama has about 176,000 “stars” (bookmarks) and nearly 17,000 “forks” (copies people make to change or build on).

Why it matters

Ollama is part of a wider push to run more AI locally, on a person’s own machine, instead of always sending requests to a company’s servers. For businesses and individuals, that can mean more control over costs and data, especially when AI tasks get large or frequent.

Source: TechCrunch AI