Michael Chiang

While studying electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo in Canada, Chiang, together with software engineering students Jeffrey Morgan and Sean Li, spotted an opportunity during co-op work terms: developers needed an easier way to build applications with Docker on a Mac.⁠[1]

The three began work in an off-campus apartment near the university, posting a video of a prototype that synchronized between cloud and desktop on Hacker News, which drew 700 developers wanting to sign up.⁠[2]

The team won $25,000 at the Velocity Venture Fund finals and then received seed financing and mentoring through the Accelerator Centre’s JumpStart program, supported by FedDev Ontario, Communitech and Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry. The first beta, Kite, launched in October 2013 and passed 1,000 users within a week; following user feedback, the team moved the product out of the cloud and turned it into an open source desktop tool.⁠[1]

The tool, Kitematic, was a Mac-only open source GUI that cut installing and managing Docker containers from 30 minutes to an hour down to a few minutes, and it gathered 2,600 GitHub stars in less than six months.⁠[2][3]

On March 12, 2015 Docker announced the acquisition of Kitematic for an undisclosed amount, less than two years after the company was founded. The three founders became Docker employees and moved to San Francisco to keep building Kitematic inside Docker, with plans for a Windows version.⁠[2][3][1]

In a jointly signed 2026 post, Morgan and Chiang wrote that their work at Docker became Docker Desktop, launched in 2016 and used by over ten million developers.⁠[4]

Chiang and Morgan co-founded OllamaOllamaOllama is an AI infrastructure company that develops the Ollama tool for downloading and running open large language models on personal computers and in the cloud. Founded by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang and part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, it announced in 2026 that it had raised $88 million in total.Open the full entry, which took part in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch with both listed as founders. Ollama lets developers download and run open models on their own computers and in the cloud.⁠[5][6]

On July 9, 2026 Morgan and Chiang jointly announced that Ollama had raised $88 million in total, at a time when it served 8.9 million developers.⁠[4]

Ollama: Official website: https://ollama.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mchiang0610 (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchiang0610/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]