turbopuffer logoturbopuffer memo
date:
mon, 20 nov 2023 15:00:00 gmt
to:
everyone
from:
founding team
subject:
our company

turbopuffer's mission is to make every byte searchable.

Populating LLM context windows with fresh data means we're asking more from our search systems 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 engine 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 retrieval engine.

We host 150B+ documents, handle writes at 1M docs/s, and serve 6K+ queries/s. We are ready for far more. We hope you'll trust us with your queries.

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.

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.

Nikhil Benesch

db engineer

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

db engineer

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

db engineer

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

Bojan Serafimov

db engineer

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

db engineer

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

Xavier Denis

db engineer

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.

Arash Nawyan

customer engineer

Arash speaks more languages than any of us (probably combined), by way of the most fascinating journey of life. Now he's speaking Rust, React, and to our customers to make them wildly successful on turbopuffer.

Roko Kruze

solutions engineer

Roko has the coolest name on the team, and a weathered solutions engineer with experience from Modular, RedPanda, CockroachDB, and Cloudera.

Mike Gagnon

CFO

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

Joakim Keussen

design (occasional; mysterious; contract)

Joakim designed the website & vibe ('nuff said). Superhuman patience to Simon's endless nits. Chief Emoji Officer.

offices

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