Ollama, the developer platform behind one of the most popular ways to run open-source AI models locally, has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Benchmark partner Peter Fenton. The round also attracted backing from Theory Ventures, 8VC, Y Combinator, and several technology executives.
The latest investment brings Ollama’s total funding to $88 million, although the company has not disclosed its valuation.
Ollama said the new capital will help expand its cloud platform, improve developer tools, and strengthen its hybrid AI inference capabilities. It also plans to add support for newly released open AI models more quickly while continuing to prioritize local model execution.
Launched in 2023 by Jeff Lindsay and Michael Crosby, Ollama has built a strong following by making it simple for developers to download and run open-weight AI models on their own computers with a single command. The platform also lets users access those models through a local API, reducing the need for complex infrastructure.
The company says its platform is now used by 8.9 million developers and has been adopted by 85% of Fortune 500 companies, highlighting its growing presence in the enterprise AI ecosystem.
Announcing the funding, the founders said it will support the next stage of the company’s growth. Their roadmap includes seamless switching between local and cloud inference, same-day support for newly released open models, and a cloud platform that allows developers to use powerful AI models without sacrificing data ownership or privacy.
A major focus for Ollama is giving developers more control over how they deploy AI. Instead of relying on API keys or dedicated servers, users can run models directly on their own hardware while keeping their data under their control.
The company also revealed that demand for Ollama Cloud is growing rapidly, with token usage more than doubling on average every month. The managed service currently offers access to open AI models such as DeepSeek, GLM, Nemotron, Kimi, and MiniMax.
Looking ahead, Ollama is building a hybrid deployment experience that will allow developers to move workloads between local devices and the cloud without losing ownership of their models or data.
Lindsay and Crosby are no strangers to developer tools. Before founding Ollama, they created Kitematic, a Docker management application that Docker acquired in 2015. Their work later became Docker Desktop, which they say is now used by more than 10 million developers worldwide.
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