# 8.9 Million AI Users > Source: > Published: 2026-07-09 00:00:00+00:00 It all started when I knocked on a door in Palo Alto. I 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/). Since 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. More than 8.9m developers use Ollama, a number growing by nearly one million every week. These users run Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes, & 65,000 more applications & integrations on top of Ollama. Ollama makes AI simple. Download the app & start running AI on your laptop in seconds. Here it is running on my Macbook : I 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. 85% 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. Data never leaves the user’s machine when running locally. Businesses can customize their AI & own it. Ollama 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). Today we announced our investment leading Ollama’s $65m Series B, alongside Benchmark, YC, & others. The 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. If you want to run an open model, [start here](https://ollama.com/).