Ollama, the open source tool that lets developers run AI models on their own computers, has raised a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures, CEO Jeff Morgan announced on July 9, 2026. The round brings the company’s total funding to $88 million, following a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton.
Launched in 2023, Ollama is now used by over 8.9 million developers every month and is present in 85% of Fortune 500 companies, according to Morgan. The project has accumulated 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub — all with a team of just 14 employees.
Morgan and co-founder Michael Chiang previously built Docker Desktop, a tool that simplified how cloud applications move across environments. Ollama applies a similar approach to AI: abstracting away the complexity of setting up open-weight AI models so developers can get them running in minutes. “Open models started coming out in 2023 but they were really hard to use,” Morgan said. “As a result, it was really hard to get them up and running.”
Beyond the free desktop product, Ollama also offers cloud-hosted access to larger models through subscription tiers ranging from free to $100 per month, with usage tracked by GPU time rather than token limits. Morgan says the company’s business case sharpened around January, when larger open models became capable of handling agentic tasks like coding.
Fenton, who joined Ollama’s board after leading its Series A, cited the founders’ Docker track record as a key factor in his backing. “The creative powers to create a product that goes to ubiquity for developers is extremely rare,” he said.
The company has faced some criticism that its cloud ambitions detract from its free open source roots, but Morgan describes the hosted service as an extension of the same mission. “Those state-of-the-art, large, open models are often too big to run on your own computer,” he said. “So we said, ‘Hey, let’s help find the compute for that.'” Fenton added that the core free desktop product remains unchanged.
Source: TechCrunch