Who's who · Open-source projects
Ollama
Open-source tool for downloading and running open-weight AI models on your own computer
At a glance
- Founded
- 2021
- Based in
- San Francisco, United States
- People
- Jeffrey Morgan, Co-founder and chief executive; Michael Chiang, Co-founder
- Known for
- Ollama, Ollama app, Ollama cloud models
- Licence
- MIT
- Funding
- Private; $88M raised, including a $65M Series B (Jul 2026)
- Monthly developers
- 8.9 million (Jul 2026)
- Employees
- 14 (Jul 2026)
- Y Combinator batch
- Winter 2021
- Website
- https://ollama.com
Ollama makes it simple to download and run open-weight language models on a personal computer. Open-weight models are ones whose trained parameters are published for anyone to run. Its open-source tool, launched in 2023 under the MIT licence, works from the command line, through a local API and through desktop apps for macOS and Windows, and offers a curated library of models from the major open-model labs. It also offers cloud models, which run larger models on data-centre hardware through the same tools, sold through monthly plans.
Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang founded the company. They had earlier helped build Docker Desktop after Docker bought their startup, Kitematic. Ollama went through Y Combinator and is based in San Francisco.
In July 2026 Ollama said it was used by 8.9 million developers a month and was present in 85% of Fortune 500 companies, with a team of 14 people. It raised a $65 million Series B that month, bringing total funding to $88 million. Its GitHub repository has more than 180,000 stars.
Sources
- Ollama, All aboard open models (Series B announcement), 2026-07-09
- TechCrunch (via Yahoo Finance), Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users, 2026-07-09
- Y Combinator, Ollama company profile, 2026-10-02
- GitHub, ollama/ollama repository, 2026-10-02
Facts last checked 2026-10-02