Ollama raised 88 million dollars to stay free and local

You download an open model, it runs on your machine. No cloud, no stranger's server, no token passing through a third party. That's Ollama. For a team that works locally and doesn't trust anything by default, this isn't exotic. It's daily life.

8.9 million people on a tool that, by design, sends nothing out - a serious number, precisely because it's chosen by people who care about control. But 88 million in venture capital (money from investment funds) in something whose whole value is being free and local raises the question of return. An investor doesn't put in money for a good cause. Sooner or later they want an exit. And the exit usually runs through a cloud, an enterprise tier, or a paid layer on top of the free one.

Free and local is a product decision, until it becomes an obstacle to returning the capital.

We keep using Ollama as before, but we're watching three things. Whether the local mode stays fully capable. Whether an enterprise version appears that pushes the local one to second class. And whether the license on the tool itself changes. Until then, it's a tool. Not a promise.

The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.