Ollama

About Ollama

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Ollama

All products by Ollama reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

OllamaLLM Platforms

Run open AI models locally or in the cloud

From $20/mo8.4/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Ollama

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Ollama's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.4 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Ollama competes with, and how they differ.

LM Studio8.2/10

Provides a GUI-based desktop app for running local LLMs with a chat interface, whereas Ollama focuses on a lightweight CLI and API-first approach for developers.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Hugging Face8.9/10

Offers a broader model hub, hosted inference, and training tools rather than a dedicated local-runtime product, with Ollama being narrower but simpler for local deployment.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Together AI8.0/10

Runs open-source models on hosted cloud infrastructure with usage-based pricing, competing for the same open-model users who might otherwise run models locally via Ollama.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Fireworks AI8.0/10

Delivers optimized cloud-hosted inference for open-source models with enterprise SLAs, contrasting with Ollama's local, offline-first hardware-based approach.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

G

GPT4All

A comparable open-source project for running LLMs locally with a focus on consumer-grade hardware and a built-in desktop chat client.

l

llama.cpp

The underlying inference engine many local LLM tools (including Ollama) build on, distributed as a raw library/CLI for developers wanting lower-level control without Ollama's packaging and model management layer.

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Ollama's history, with sources.

1. Jul 9, 2026Funding

   Series B -- $65M led by Theory Ventures

   Ollama raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Ventures, with Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator and others participating, bringing total funding to $88M; the company reported roughly 8.9 million monthly developers and 14 employees at the time.

   techcrunch.com
2. Aug 5, 2025Partnership

   Launch partner for OpenAI's gpt-oss open-weight models

   Ollama was a day-one distribution partner for gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b, OpenAI's first open-weight model release since GPT-2, adding agentic tool-calling and adjustable reasoning effort support.

   ollama.com
3. Jul 30, 2025Launch

   First native desktop GUI app

   Ollama shipped v0.10.0, its first native desktop application with a graphical chat interface for macOS and Windows, adding drag-and-drop file support and multimodal image input on top of the existing CLI.

   ollama.com
4. Feb 15, 2024Launch

   Windows preview release

   Ollama shipped a native Windows preview build with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, full model-library access, and a background API service compatible with the OpenAI API.

   ollama.com
5. Feb 8, 2024Launch

   OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions API

   Ollama added experimental compatibility with the OpenAI Chat Completions API, letting existing OpenAI-tooling integrations (Vercel AI SDK, AutoGen) point at local models via a localhost endpoint.

   ollama.com
6. 2024Funding

   Series A -- $15M led by Benchmark

   Benchmark led a $15M Series A, with partner Peter Fenton joining Ollama's board; exact month of close was not disclosed in press coverage.

   techcrunch.com
7. Oct 5, 2023Launch

   Official Docker container image

   Ollama shipped as a Docker Sponsored Open Source image, giving Linux users a supported CPU- or GPU-accelerated container path instead of the native install script.

   ollama.com
8. Jul 8, 2023Founded

   Initial public release (v0.0.1)

   Jeff Morgan and Michael Chiang -- previously behind Kitematic, acquired by Docker -- released the first public version of Ollama, a local runtime for running open-weight LLMs on personal machines.

   github.com