Ollama Raises $65M as Open Source AI Runtime Hits 9M Users

Ollama, the open source tool that lets developers run AI models locally on their own hardware, has closed a $65M funding round and grown to nearly 9 million users. Backed by Benchmark, the project has accumulated over 176,000 GitHub stars and nearly 17,000 forks. The raise signals strong investor appetite for local, privacy-first AI infrastructure.

Ollama, one of the most popular tools for running large language models locally, has raised $65 million in new funding — a major vote of confidence in the growing movement toward on-device AI.

The Benchmark-backed startup has quietly become a cornerstone of the developer AI ecosystem, letting engineers pull and run models like Llama, Mistral, and Gemma directly on their machines without cloud dependencies.

Explosive Community Growth

The numbers speak for themselves:

~9 million users and counting
176,000+ GitHub stars
Nearly 17,000 forks

Those figures put Ollama among the most widely adopted developer tool projects in the AI space — comparable in community traction to tools like LangChain or Hugging Face's core libraries.

Why Local AI Is Having a Moment

Ollama's growth reflects a broader shift in how developers want to work with AI. Rather than routing every inference call through a third-party API, teams are increasingly looking to run models locally — for reasons ranging from latency and cost to data privacy and offline capability.

Ollama makes this accessible. Its CLI-first design allows developers to get a model running in minutes, with a simple ollama run command handling model download, quantization, and serving behind the scenes.

What the Funding Signals

The $65M raise suggests investors see a durable business model emerging around local AI infrastructure — whether through enterprise tooling, managed services, or deeper hardware integrations.

Founded by Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang, the company has so far grown largely through word-of-mouth and open source momentum. The new capital gives them runway to build out the commercial layer on top of that foundation.

The Competitive Landscape

Ollama isn't alone in this space. Tools like LM Studio, Jan, and llama.cpp are competing for the local inference audience. But Ollama's GitHub traction and ease of use have given it a meaningful head start — particularly among developers who want something that just works without deep configuration.

With $65M now in the bank and nearly 9 million users as leverage, Ollama is well-positioned to define what local AI infrastructure looks like at scale.