Ollama has raised a reported $65 million as demand grows for developer tools that make open models easier to run locally and inside private workflows.

TechCrunch reported the new financing on Thursday, while Ollama's own site says the company now serves 8.9 million developers and has raised $88 million in total from Benchmark, Theory Ventures, 8VC, Y Combinator, and angel investors. The company did not need a complicated pitch to find a market: its core product gives developers a simple way to download, run, and manage AI models on their own machines.

That local-first approach has become more important as teams experiment with coding agents, private document workflows, and model routing that cannot always send data to hosted APIs. Ollama sits in that developer infrastructure layer, abstracting away some of the friction around model files, runtimes, and local serving.

The round also points to a broader shift in the AI tooling market. Many companies are racing to build fully managed agents and cloud model platforms, but a large group of developers still wants control over where inference runs and what data leaves their environment. Ollama's growth suggests that local open-model infrastructure remains a real category, not just a hobbyist lane.