On the back of a big 2025, Ottawa technology startup Turbopuffer has secured some fresh financing to scale its fast-growing search infrastructure for AI applications.
Turbopuffer was launched in 2023 by a pair of former Shopify engineers: CEO Simon Eskildsen and CTO Justine Li. It has already amassed big-name clients like Anthropic, Atlassian, Cursor, and Notion. The company aims to “make every byte searchable”—an increasingly important task in the AI era.
“Connecting AI with large amounts of fresh data means we’re asking more from search than ever before.”
Simon Eskildsen,
Turbopuffer
“Connecting AI with large amounts of fresh data means we’re asking more from search than ever before,” Eskildsen and Li wrote in a memo on Turbopuffer’s website. “First-hand, we’ve seen companies limit product ambition by cost and operational toil of incumbents.”
Turbopuffer describes itself as a “fast search engine that combines vector and full-text search using object storage” to help AI clients search their data more quickly, cheaply, and scalably.
In a LinkedIn post, Eskildsen claimed that the startup grew its sales tenfold and its headcount fivefold in 2025, and now manages trillions of vectors and tens of petabytes. TBPN claims its annual recurring revenue has grown to the “10s of millions” this year.
“In 2025, we’ve proved the puffer architecture is capable of state-of-the-art vector and text search,” Eskildsen wrote. “Next year, we’ll continue to optimize the core and widen our surface area, to make it effortless to search every byte.”
As it looks to build on that growth, Turbopuffer has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from existing backer Lachy Groom and new investor Thrive Capital. Groom is the former head of Stripe Issuing and co-founder of Physical Intelligence; New York City-based Thrive is a venture capital firm founded and led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of former Donald Trump advisor Jared Kushner.
Ivan Zhao, the founder and CEO of Turbopuffer client Notion, posted that in the companies’ shared Slack channel, “Every message is replied within minutes. Every feature request is always answered. It feels like these guys work at Notion. This is the level of care and support we want from vendors. Bullish [on] Turbopuffer.”
“That’s what we want people to focus on,” Eskildsen told TBPN yesterday. “What do our customers say? What are they doing with Turbopuffer? That’s what we care about … To me, the fundraising round would be like showing you my office lease. These are the things that we need to get things done … The important things are tweets like the one from Ivan.”
BetaKit has reached out to Turbopuffer for comment on the size of the round, the company’s traction to date, and how it plans to invest this financing.
Eskildsen previously worked as a principal engineer at Shopify, while Li served as a senior staff software engineer. During their eight years together with the company, the pair claimed they worked on nearly every part of Shopify’s infrastructure and scaled it from 1,000 to one million requests per second, before leaving in 2021.
Turbopuffer’s website indicates that the startup currently has 22 employees—six of whom are Canadian—and a presence across Ottawa, Vancouver, and New York City.
Feature image courtesy Turbopuffer.