How did they raise that amount of money if they are so hated, I see only bad comments everywhere about ollama. Not a fan of them myself, but they played a good part in local ai since the beginning. The investors screw everything: Ollama announced an $88 million financing on July 9, 2026. The named participants were:

Investment firms and organizations

Benchmark — represented by Peter Fenton Theory Ventures — Tomasz Tunguz 8VC — Alex Kolicich Y Combinator Garage Capital Pace Capital 49 Palms GTMFund

Individual investors

Solomon Hykes — Docker founder Aaron Katz — ClickHouse CEO Spencer Kimball — Cockroach Labs co-founder and GIMP co-creator Quinn Slack — Amp CEO Marianna Tessel — Cisco board member Michael Montano — former Twitter head of engineering Other unnamed angel investors >like lmstudio and google/alphabet maybe!

Investors are not free

Peter Fenton invested in the company when it was called Infra.App originally (I think it's still online: https://infra.app/). It was an access management product, then it became desktop Kubernetes product, both they pivoted out of. I imagine he invested based on the technical acumen of the founders and then worked with them to pivot when Ollama started working out. Almost all of the other investors invested in the founders based on that original idea space (which wasn't a great one but was quite adjacent.) I think that includes 8VC, YC, Pace Capital, GTMFund, who all followed on here.

Since it pivoted, I imagine the story they are telling is the usage. But you can add to that Peter Fenton has had incredible success in commercial open source (Docker-ish, Elastic, JBoss, CockroachDB, TimeScaleDB, and if you include Benchmark there is Elastic, Confluent, etc.) so a bunch of these people are probably trying to ride the Peter Fenton/Benchmark train. My guess is that's what Theory is doing.

Investors are not free but they are very hype driven. There are < 10 investors who are truly experts in open source in my opinion in the market (and maybe < 5.) It's a really wacky cadence and I would argue there are different types of OSS businesses, which makes it even more difficult to be an expert. It's something I struggle with personally investing in OSS -- I think I understand the likely motion for an OSS startup and then > 50% of the time I am wrong.

Why blame the investors? You went out of your way to even name them so we can bash them, why? Ollama founders sought them. Ollama founders wanted the money. Ollama founders took the money. Ollama founders took all the decisions that made people now dislike Ollama. Nobody forced their hands, it was their plan all along...