Ollama: all aboard open models

Ollama announced an $88 million funding round. The company listed investors including Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures, Alex Kolicich at 8VC, and Y Combinator, along with angels Solomon Hykes, Aaron Katz, Spencer Kimball, Quinn Slack, Marianna Tessel, Michael Montano, and firms Garage Capital, Pace Capital, 49 Palms and GTMFund.

Ollama said it serves 8.9 million developers and is used by 85% of the Fortune 500. It described itself as a leading platform for accessing open models, offering a downloadable app to run the latest open models in a single command with a simple API.

The company said its cloud provides access to open models including GLM, Nemotron, DeepSeek, Kimi and MiniMax, and that its cloud token volume has on average more than doubled every month.

Ollama framed its work around three principles: ownership, affordability and privacy. It said open models can be kept, customized and optimized without lock-out; that models running on a user's own hardware avoid per-token bills; and that locally run models let data stay on the machine, with the same trust carried into the cloud when scaling.

Ollama said the funding will support seamless hybrid inference, support for new open models on release day, and a cloud that lets developers and teams reach powerful models without giving up ownership or privacy. It thanked teams releasing open models and said it intends to keep pushing the open model ecosystem forward.