Open source AI darling Ollama secures $65 million as developers flock to open models

Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B round led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells Julie Bort of TechCrunch. The funding follows a $15 million Series A led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, bringing the company’s total funding to $88 million.

Ollama, launched in 2023, lets developers run open-weight AI models on their own computers. The tool has gathered 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub. According to Morgan, Ollama now serves over 8.9 million developers monthly and sits inside 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies, all with a team of just 14 employees.

From containers to AI models

Morgan and co-founder Michael Chiang previously built Docker Desktop after their startup Kitematic was acquired by Docker. Fenton says this experience convinced him to back the company. “The creative powers to create a product that goes to ubiquity for developers is extremely rare,” he tells TechCrunch.

Beyond the free desktop tool, Ollama also runs a cloud business, offering access to larger models through subscription tiers ranging from free to $100 per month, billed by GPU time rather than token limits. Morgan points to the rise of agentic AI tools like OpenClaw earlier this year as proof that open models can handle serious workloads, fueling demand for the paid service.

Not everyone has welcomed this shift. Some developers have accused Ollama of “enshittification,” worried that commercial ambitions might overshadow the free tool. Fenton pushes back on that concern: “Nothing has changed for the core product that’s free on the desktop.”