{"id":683963,"date":"2026-07-10T09:29:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T09:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683963\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T09:29:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T09:29:28","slug":"popular-open-source-ai-developer-tool-ollama-raises-65m-grows-to-nearly-9m-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/683963\/","title":{"rendered":"Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users"},"content":{"rendered":"

The popular open source AI tool Ollama<\/a> has raised a $65 million Series B, led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells TechCrunch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This round follows a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark\u2019s Peter Fenton. All told, the company has now raised $88 million.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ollama, which launched in 2023, helps devs run open-weight AI models on their PCs, getting them up and running in minutes. It has been praised by developers across countless training<\/a> sites, videos<\/a>, blogs<\/a> and social media<\/a> posts. It has amassed 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Developers can also use Ollama to find models and access larger, more complex ones that it hosts on its neocloud via several subscription tiers, from free to $100\/month. It also tracks usage based on GPU time, not token limits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the mission to help developers more easily build on their PCs sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Morgan and his co-founder Michael Chiang previously helped build Docker Desktop.\u00a0They landed at Docker after it bought their previous startup, Kitematic. Docker makes containers that help cloud apps easy to move from cloud to cloud, or from desktop to cloud, abstracting away all the pesky hardware configuration issues.<\/p>\n

So Ollama essentially did for AI what Docker and Docker Desktop did for cloud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOpen models started coming out in 2023 but they were really hard to use,\u201d Morgan said. They had been geared toward researchers at the time, not programmers. \u201cAs a result, it was really hard to get them up and running.\u201d\u00a0Three years after launching, Ollama is now \u201cused by over 8.9 million developers every month, sitting in 85% of the Fortune 500 and growing like crazy,\u201d he said. All with only 14 employees.<\/p>\n

That career experience is what drew Benchmark\u2019s Peter Fenton to lead its earlier round and join the board.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Jeff and Michael built with Docker is being used by 10 million-plus developers every day. The creative powers to create a product that goes to ubiquity for developers is extremely rare,\u201d Fenton told TechCrunch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Morgan and Fenton declined to discuss the startup\u2019s revenues and new valuation. However, Morgan says that the proving point for Ollama as a business happened around January, when OpenClaw became hot. That\u2019s when larger open models \u201csuddenly became able to do these agentic tasks, like coding. Obviously, we saw the explosion of the assistants like OpenClaw, and this idea that open models can get real work done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since then, the industry has been abuzz with the idea that paying users (particularly deep-pocketed enterprises and fast-growing AI application-layer startups) will increasingly turn to more affordable open models, reserving their use of closed models like Anthropic for more of an as-needed basis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI still think that this is the part that most of the debate gets wrong. It\u2019s not an either\/or,\u201d Fenton says of open versus closed AI models. There will be plenty of business for both, he contends. However, every company with high inference expenses \u2014 the costs of using the models \u2014 has a \u201cvital existential project\u201d pushing them to move \u201cto open-weight models,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of evidence that such startups and enterprises are already turning to open models for their daily needs.<\/a> That, obviously, bodes well for Ollama\u2019s cloud business.<\/p>\n

But even more interesting, Ollama is another example of how AI is birthing a large new crop of open source projects that are turning into companies pursued by VCs.\u00a0There are open source inference providers like Inferact, maker of vLLM, <\/a>and RadixArk, maker of SGLang<\/a>. There is OpenClaw and its alternatives like NanoClaw.<\/a> There are even tiny startups building their own open models from scratch, like Arcee.<\/a><\/p>\n

To be sure, not every Ollama fan has been happy that the company has been pursuing making a living. About a year ago,\u00a0a bunch<\/a> of blog<\/a> and social media posts<\/a> complained that its cloud business was drawing attention away from its beloved free project and cited Ollama as an example of the so-called \u201cEnshittification\u201d of dev tools<\/a>, as the trend is called.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Morgan sees its cloud service as an evolution of its open source mission to help programmers find and easily use models. Those state-of-the-art, large, open models are often \u201ctoo big to run on your own computer. So we said, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s help find the compute for that,\u2019\u201d he explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Board member Fenton adds, \u201cNothing has changed for the core product that\u2019s free on the desktop. There\u2019s zero change to the premise that this is the place you can discover and run local models.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The popular open source AI tool Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B, led by Theory Ventures,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,169095,1345,228210,86,228211,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-683963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-benchmark-partners","tag-exclusive","tag-ollama","tag-technology","tag-theory-ventures","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}