Michael and I first met in college, where we started our first company, Kitematic, which made Docker dead-simple to run. In 2015, it was acquired by Docker. There, our work became Docker Desktop, launched in 2016 and now used by over ten million developers around the world.
Ten years later, we’re back, building Ollama — the easiest way for developers to get up and running with open models. Beyond our wildest dreams, Ollama has quickly become the leading platform to access open models, serving 8.9 million developers who, just like us, believe that AI should be yours to build, run, and make your own.
The personal computer moment for AI
Computing has been here before: the personal computer took the machine out of the mainframe room and put it on your desk — yours to own, customize, and build with. Open models are now enabling that moment for AI.
A few years ago we watched as powerful new open models emerged. They were freely available to download, but it was hard to get them working. The power was there, but it wasn’t unlocked for developers who wanted to consume them the way they could access proprietary models behind an API.
So we got to work. With our team we shipped Ollama, an app you could download on your computer to get up and running with the latest open models in a single command, and build on them via a simple API. Ollama quickly became the place where developers could feel at home to discover the latest open models and learn how to put them to work.
With Ollama, running an open model became as easy as running any other piece of software: no permission, API key, or expensive server hardware required. Your model. Your machine. Your data.
AI that you own: personal & private
We built Ollama around three principles that matter most to our customers and community:
Ownership. Open models are yours to keep, customize, and optimize. You’re never locked out of the models your agent or app depends on, and you have complete freedom to change them.
Affordability. Models that run on your own hardware don’t come with runaway per-token bills. You can experiment, iterate, and ship without worrying that every prompt is adding cost.
Privacy. With open models that can run locally, your data never has to leave your machine. When you do need to scale, you can carry that same trust into the cloud.
Scaling open models to solve the world’s hardest problems
Open models aren’t an experiment or a research project anymore. They’re now running inside the largest companies in the world — Ollama is used by 85% of the Fortune 500 — and it’s just the beginning.
What started as the joy of running an open model on your computer for the first time has evolved into the drive to solve very difficult problems once reserved for proprietary models. Ollama’s cloud is the most delightful way to access the most powerful open models: GLM, Nemotron, DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax and more. On average, Ollama’s cloud has more than doubled in token volume every month, and we can’t wait to make it available to every team.
All in on open
Today, we’re announcing that Ollama has raised $88M from Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures, Alex Kolicich at 8VC, along with Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker), Aaron Katz (CEO of ClickHouse), Spencer Kimball (co-creator of GIMP and co-founder of Cockroach Labs), Quinn Slack (CEO of Amp), Marianna Tessel (board of directors, Cisco), Michael Montano (former head of engineering at Twitter), and Y Combinator, Garage Capital, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, GTMFund, and many other incredible angel investors.
This funding is fuel for what’s ahead. Ollama sits front and center in the open model ecosystem, and we intend to push it forward as hard as we can: 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.
None of this happens without the people behind the models. Thank you to the teams releasing powerful, openly available models and moving the entire field ahead. Our job is to make their incredible work effortless to run for everyone and to keep it open.
We’ve stood at the beginning of a shift like this once before, betting that open and easy would win. We’re betting on it again, with everything we’ve got.
It’s time to drive open-source AI forward. All aboard.
To get started, download Ollama and start building with open models:
ollama
Thank you to everyone who’s run a model, filed an issue, built an integration or shipped something with Ollama. We love hearing your feedback. We’re only here because of you.
— Jeff & Michael