Ollama raises a $65 million Series B led by Theory Ventures, bringing its total funding to $88 million. The company says more than 8.9 million developers use its tool each month to run open-weight AI models locally, while its cloud service offers access to larger models through subscription tiers. Co-founder Jeff Morgan says the cloud service extends Ollama’s mission, while board member Peter Fenton says the free desktop product remains unchanged.
A Medium post on Conifer's Sage launch describes a product that runs locally on the user's machine instead of sending work to the cloud. The model, the data, and the work all stay on the device, the opposite of mainstream tools that ship code off-device and expose it to network vulnerabilities and quiet data collection. Sage is a 1.0 release from a company whose LinkedIn page had 53 followers, and it ships as a closed product: the core technology comes as a finished app you cannot look inside.
Ollama ranks first on the 2024 ROSS Index, adding 76,000 GitHub stars during the year. Its star count grows 261% to more than 105,000, with the article reporting a current total of over 172,000 stars.
