Conditional writes shipped
turbopuffer logoturbopuffer memo

date:

wed, oct 4th 2023 12:14:00 est

to:

everyone

from:

founding team

subject:

our company

turbopuffer's mission is to make every byte searchable.

Connecting AI with large amounts of fresh data means we're asking more from search than ever before. First-hand, we've seen companies limit product ambition by cost and operational toil of incumbents.

We've designed turbopuffer from first principles:

  1. Scalability, by separating compute and storage
  2. Cost, by moving data between NVMe and object storage
  3. Reliability, through simplicity
  4. Performance, with tpuf's custom tiered storage engine

Justin and I grew up at Shopify scaling the core from 1K to 1M RPS. Our drive for operational simplicity is shaped by years of being on the last-resort pager for a platform powering millions of $ per minute. We are channeling all the hard-won lessons of scale into making turbopuffer the most scalable and reliable search engine.

We host 1T+ documents, handle writes at 10M+ writes/s, and serve 10K+ queries/s. We are ready for far more. We hope you'll trust us with your workload.

We're backed by Lachy Groom Fund, as well as Arjun Narayan (Materialize), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal), Jessie Frazelle (Zoo & Oxide), Kenneth Auchenberg, Mikey Shulman (Suno), Richard Artoul (WarpStream), Solmaz Shahalizadeh (Shopify), Sualeh Asif (Cursor), and others. And most importantly, our team.

Simon Hørup Eskildsen

co-founder & CEO

Justin Li

co-founder & CTO

team

Simon Hørup Eskildsen

co-founder & CEO

Wrote V1 of tpuf, which everyone refers to as 'founder code'... that's good, right? Previously principal engineer/director at Shopify, working closely with Justin for 8 years scaling the database and compute layer from 1K to 1M RPS.

Justin Li

co-founder & CTO

p9999 in their pursuit of simplicity and pragmatism. They were previously an infra engineer at Shopify, working closely with Simon to scale Shopify for flash sales and multi-tenancy.

Bojan Serafimov

eng

IOI (where Simon and Bojan met; Bojan was better) & IMO medalist. Previous Core contributor to storage at Neon. Invented bojanchess: each piece inherits the moveset of any friendly pieces that could attack it, knight inheritance recurses.

Morgan Gallant

eng

Previously founded Operand, helping companies search their data. Expert at tier-lists, Zig-trolling, choosing lunch, and allocating lots of memory.

Xavier Denis

eng

Creator of Creusot during his PhD, a leading Rust program verifier; now back in industry with force. Former Shopify infra alongside Justin and Simon. French-Texan; dream combo.

Nikhil Benesch

eng

Hard to describe Nikhil as anything other than a sheer force of nature who will do anything to push forward the company. He was previously CTO at Materialize.

Nathan VanBenschoten

eng

Nathan's proof there's such a thing as non-quadratic infinite context windows. Previously a principal engineer at CockroachDB, focused on transactions and replication.

Dan Harrison

eng

Dan the Storage Man, previously led storage at Materialize, now grinding bytes to bits at turbopuffer.

Jenn Vanden Elzen

people

She's a flower farmer, Canada's #1 fan, and has talked to more Waterloo grads than anyone else. Used to lead eng recruitment at Shopify, now helping team tpuf grow.

Roko Kruze

gtm

Roko has the coolest name on the team, and has built customer facing teams at Modular, RedPanda, CockroachDB, and Cloudera. You'll find him in Slack (trust me).

Mike Gagnon

finance

Money Mike was on Shopify's finance team from Series A through IPO. Loves money, margins, and NetSuite.

Jeff Holoman

gtm

Jeff might be the only one in sales who's also an Apache committer. Claims he's never played pickleball.

Tarun Pothulapati

eng

Tarun keeps the pods puffin'! Herds clusters, makes the control plane as nice to use as Linear, and optimizes machine types.

Andrea Lattuada

eng

Built Verus to verify Rust systems code; now optimizing bytes at turbopuffer. His vice after a long day is cordon bleu.

Adrien Grand

eng

Previously at Elastic. Top committer to Lucene since 2012, and to turbopuffer since 2025.

Robert Maybin

gtm

Three decades of pushing every database generation to its limits at Apple, Dremio, and as co-founder of Sundeck. Now helps customers push their product's limits with turbopuffer.

offices

turbopuffer is a Canadian, remote-first company. We spin up offices in cities with N ≥ 2 puffers. Come stop by!

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