What Ollama does
Ollama is the most popular way to run open-source large language models on your own machine. With a single command or its desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, developers can pull and run models like Llama, Mistral, Gemma, Qwen, and DeepSeek locally, complete with an OpenAI-compatible local API for building applications. Its model library, simple CLI, and privacy guarantees (your data stays local and isn't used for training) have made it a default building block in the local-AI ecosystem and a backend for countless apps and agent frameworks.
Cloud and adoption
Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang and a Y Combinator company, Ollama has become one of the most-starred AI projects on GitHub. Beyond local inference, Ollama now offers a cloud service with paid Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($100/mo) tiers that run larger models on datacenter infrastructure with parallel requests, bridging local development and scalable inference. Its OpenAI-compatible API, broad model support, and strong open-source community make it a foundational tool for developers who want control, privacy, and easy local-to-cloud workflows.