Ollama, the Palo Alto-based platform for running open-weight AI models locally, has raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, and GTMFund.
The round brings Ollama’s total funding to $88 million, following a $15 million Series A led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, who now sits on the company’s board. What makes the raise notable is the team’s efficiency: just 14 employees built and maintain a tool used by 8.9 million developers monthly.
“Open models should be easy to run, easy to build with, and available wherever people need them — on your own machine, in the cloud, or both,” said Jeffrey Morgan, CEO and co-founder of Ollama. The company’s lightweight platform allows developers to run models like Llama, Mistral, and Gemma locally with a simple command-line interface.
The Platform Layer for Open AI
Ollama has become the de facto standard for local AI model execution, with developer adoption accelerating as open-weight models improve and enterprises seek cost-effective alternatives to cloud-based API calls. The platform’s simplicity — a single command to download and run any open model — has driven viral adoption among individual developers and small teams.
The Series B funding will be used to expand the platform’s capabilities, improve model compatibility, and build developer tooling around model management and deployment. The company’s 14-person headcount and massive user base make it one of the most capital-efficient AI infrastructure companies in the market.
