Ollama, the open-source platform that lets developers run large language models on their own computers instead of the cloud, has raised $65 million in a Series B round led by Theory Ventures, the company said in a July 9 blog post. The round brings Ollama’s total funding to $88 million and included participation from Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, and a roster of angel investors, including Docker founder Solomon Hykes and ClickHouse CEO Aaron Katz.

According to Ollama, the platform now has 8.9 million monthly developers and is used inside 85% of Fortune 500 companies, including regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and government. The company said usage has doubled since January 2026, with roughly a million new installs added each week.

From side project to open-model platform

Ollama was founded in 2023 by Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang, who previously built Docker Desktop before their earlier startup, Kitematic, was acquired by Docker. The tool packages open-weight models such as Llama, DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi so they can run locally with a single command, without cloud infrastructure or specialized GPU setup.

The company operates with just 14 employees, according to its own announcement — a small team relative to its reach. Ollama’s core desktop tool is free; it also offers a paid cloud tier for developers who want to offload larger models to hosted infrastructure while keeping smaller ones local.

Betting on open models

In its announcement, Ollama framed the round as a bet that open-weight models are closing the performance gap with closed, proprietary systems, making the “platform layer” developers use to run them increasingly valuable. Theory Ventures general partner Tomasz Tunguz said every era of computing has had a foundational platform layer, and argued that the infrastructure for running open models locally could become one of software’s most important layers.

The company said it will use the funding to expand its hybrid cloud infrastructure, support new open models faster, and grow its engineering team.

Read also

  • Download Ollama — free for local use; cloud plans start at $20/month (Pro) and go up to $100/month (Max), as of July 2026.