The Ottawa startup is receiving funding from Lachie Groom and Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital.
Amid the big year of 2025, an Ottawa tech startup Turbopuffer has secured new funding to scale its fast-growing search infrastructure for artificial intelligence applications.
Turbopuffer was launched in 2023 by a pair of former Shopify engineers: CEO Simon Eskildsen and CTO Justin Lee. It already has well-known clients such as Anthropic, Atlassian, Cursor and Notion. The company aims to “make every byte searchable,” a goal that has become increasingly important in the age of artificial intelligence.
“Combining AI with large amounts of fresh data means we are asking more from search than ever before.”
Simon Eskildsen,
Turbopuffer
“Combining AI with large amounts of fresh data means we are asking more from search than ever before,” Eskildsen and Lee wrote in the paper. memo on the Turbopuffer website. “We have seen first-hand how companies limit product ambition at the expense of the costs and operational labor of incumbents.”
Turbopuffer describes himself as “a fast search engine that combines vector and full-text search using object storage” to help AI customers search their data faster, cheaper and more scalably.
IN Post on LinkedInEskildsen said the startup has grown sales tenfold and headcount fivefold in 2025 and now manages trillions of vectors and tens of petabytes. TBPN states that annual recurring revenue has risen to “tens of millions” this year.
“In 2025, we proved that the Puffer architecture is capable of modern vector and text search,” Eskildsen wrote. “Next year, we will continue to optimize the core and expand its surface area to make every byte easier to find.”
Hoping to build on this 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-based Thrive is a venture capital firm founded and led by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of former Donald Trump adviser Jared Kushner.
Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Turbopuffer client Notion, published that in the companies' shared Slack channel: “Every message is answered 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 suppliers. Optimistic.” [on] Turbopuffer.
“That's what we want people to focus on,” Eskildsen. told TBPN yesterday. “What are our customers saying? What are they doing with Turbopuffer? That's what we care about… For me, a fundraising round would be like showing you my office rental. That's what we need to get things done… Tweets like the one from Ivan are the important things.”
BetaKit has reached out to Turbopuffer for comment regarding the size of the round, the company's growth to date, and how it plans to invest this funding.
Eskildsen previously worked as a chief engineer at Shopify, and Lee was a senior software engineer. During their eight years at the company, they said they worked on almost every part of Shopify's infrastructure and scaled it from 1,000 to one million requests per second before leaving in 2021.
Turbopuffer website indicates that the startup currently has 22 employees, six of whom are Canadian, and has a presence in Ottawa, Vancouver and New York.
Image provided Turbopuffer.
