Popular open source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M, grows to nearly 9M users

To be sure, not every Ollama fan has been happy that the company has been pursuing making a living. About a year ago, a bunch of blog and social media posts complained that its cloud business was drawing attention away from its beloved free project and cited Ollama as an example of the so-called “Enshittification” of dev tools, as the trend is called.  

But Morgan sees its cloud service as an evolution of its open source mission to help programmers find and easily use models. Those state-of-the-art, large, open models are often “too big to run on your own computer. So we said, ‘Hey, let’s help find the compute for that,'” he explained. 

Board member Fenton adds, “Nothing has changed for the core product that’s free on the desktop. There’s zero change to the premise that this is the place you can discover and run local models.”