Ollama CEO: 9M developers, 85% of Fortune 500, and a 150x token surge as open models go mainstream
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-05
YC's Lightcone podcast hosted Ollama co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan on the future of open models:
- Ollama now has 9M developers and is used by 85% of the Fortune 500
- The biggest shift he sees: movement toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities rapidly catching up to frontier labs
- On Ollama Cloud, this shift drove a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year
- YC's Jared Friedman adds that not just F100 enterprises but many s26 batch startups use open models for coding
The episode also covers Ollama's story from two years of searching for an idea to becoming the standard for local models.
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