They got the investments before the company was even ollama. They exist because their VC was ok with them pivoting to build the current product. It's likely it wouldn't exist without the funding.
I dunno, the founders could have also changed their frame of mind, and started the project without VC investments. AFAIK, the founding team worked at Docker before, a company that doesn't pay peanuts, so I'm sure they could have scraped together enough to bootstrap it initially.
But I understand the added zeros to the (maybe) future payout when you take VC funds is hard to ignore, I'm not blaming them for anything really.
