Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users
Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs. The popular open source AI tool Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B, led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells TechCrunch. This round follows a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton.
Key Takeaways
- All told, the company has now raised $88 million.
Ollama, which launched in 2023, helps devs run open-weight AI models on their PCs, getting them up and running in minutes.
- Docker makes containers that help cloud apps easy to move from cloud to cloud, or from desktop to cloud, abstracting away all the pesky hardware configuration issues.
So Ollama essentially did for AI what Docker and Docker Desktop did for cloud.
- The creative powers to create a product that goes to ubiquity for developers is extremely rare," Fenton told TechCrunch.
Morgan and Fenton declined to discuss the startup's revenues and new valuation.
- There will be plenty of business for both, he contends.
However, every company with high inference expenses - the costs of using the models - has a "vital existential project" pushing them to move "to open-weight models," he says.
- To be sure, not every Ollama fan has been happy that the company has been pursuing making a living.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.
- #Benchmark-backed Ollama has amassed 176,000 stars, and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub by helping developers easily run AI on their PCs.
- #The popular open source AI tool Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B, led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells TechCrunch.
- #This round follows a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark's Peter Fenton.
All told, the company has now raised $88 million. Ollama, which launched in 2023, helps devs run open-weight AI models on their PCs, getting them up and running in minutes. It has been praised by developers across countless training sites, videos , blogs and social media posts.
It has amassed 176,000 stars and nearly 17,000 forks on GitHub . It also tracks usage based on GPU time, not token limits.
If the mission to help developers more easily build on their PCs sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Morgan and his co-founder Michael Chiang previously helped build Docker Desktop. They landed at Docker after it bought their previous startup, Kitematic.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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