{"slug": "8-9-million-ai-users", "title": "8.9 Million AI Users", "summary": "Ollama, an AI platform that simplifies running open-source models locally, has reached 8.9 million developers and is used by 85% of the Fortune 500. The company raised $65 million in Series B funding led by an unnamed investor, with participation from Benchmark and Y Combinator, to expand its developer-friendly AI tools.", "body_md": "It all started when I knocked on a door in Palo Alto.\n\nI noticed the little llama icon on the door & remembered how much I loved the product. Michael opened the door & welcomed me in. That is how I became friends with the Ollama founders, [Jeff Morgan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmorganca/) & [Michael Chiang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchiang0610/).\n\nSince then, I have migrated [most](https://tomtunguz.com/localmaxxing/) of my workloads to [Ollama](https://tomtunguz.com/tags/local-ai/) ; it turns out I’m not alone.\n\nMore than 8.9m developers use Ollama, a number growing by nearly one million every week.\n\nThese users run Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, & 65,000 more applications & integrations on top of Ollama.\n\nOllama makes AI simple. Download the app & start running AI on your laptop in seconds. Here it is running on my Macbook :\n\nI run open source models locally for 70-80% of my work & then burst to the Ollama cloud for complex tasks ; a cloud that is twice as fast as others.\n\n85% of the Fortune 500 uses Ollama across healthcare, finance, & energy. We found Ollama monitoring electricity loads at a powerplant in Finland ; at a space agency in the USA ; in the CFO’s office at a public company validating financials ; & even at a particle accelerator.\n\nData never leaves the user’s machine when running locally. Businesses can customize their AI & own it.\n\nOllama has partnered with every major open-source model provider including Google, Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Zhipu, DeepSeek. Ollama offers thousands of models like GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7, Gemma, Qwen, & [Ornith](https://ollama.com/library/ornith).\n\nToday we announced our investment leading Ollama’s $65m Series B, alongside Benchmark, YC, & others.\n\nThe future of AI is open models running everywhere work gets done. Jeff & Michael built Docker’s developer experience. Now they’re building it for AI.\n\nIf you want to run an open model, [start here](https://ollama.com/).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/8-9-million-ai-users", "canonical_source": "https://www.tomtunguz.com/ollama-series-b/", "published_at": "2026-07-09 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-09 14:22:49.278281+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups", "ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Ollama", "Jeff Morgan", "Michael Chiang", "Benchmark", "Y Combinator", "Google", "Meta", "NVIDIA"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/8-9-million-ai-users", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/8-9-million-ai-users.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/8-9-million-ai-users.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/8-9-million-ai-users.jsonld"}}