Open-Source AI Platform Ollama Raises $65 Mn in Series B Funding

Ollama, a developer platform for open-source AI models, has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, with participation from Theory Ventures, 8VC, Y Combinator, and several technology executives, as the company looks to expand its cloud platform and developer tooling for open AI models.

The company did not reveal the pre-money or post-money valuation. It has raised a total of $88 million to date. 

The company said its platform is now used by 8.9 million developers and by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Ollama plans to use the new funding to expand its hybrid inference capabilities, add support for newly released open models more quickly, and grow its cloud platform while retaining its emphasis on local model execution.

Founded by Jeff Lindsay and Michael Crosby in 2023, the company is best known for software that allows developers to download and run open-weight AI models locally through a single command and access them through a local API. 

“This funding is fuel for what's ahead,” the founders wrote in a statement. They added that Ollama intends to deliver “seamless hybrid inference, support for new open models the day they’re released, and a cloud that lets any developer and their team reach the most powerful models without giving up ownership or privacy.”

Ollama works to remove the need for API keys or dedicated server infrastructure, enabling developers to run models on their own hardware while retaining control over data and deployments.

The company also disclosed growth figures for its hosted offering, stating that token volume on Ollama Cloud has more than doubled every month on average. 

The cloud service provides managed access to open models including DeepSeek, GLM, Nemotron, Kimi, and MiniMax. The company is building a hybrid deployment model to let developers move between local and cloud inference without giving up ownership or privacy.

Lindsay and Crosby previously founded Kitematic, a Docker management application that Docker acquired in 2015. Their work later became Docker Desktop, which the founders said is now used by more than 10 million developers.