"Inside the fastest-growing Canadian AI startup you’ve never heard of" – I will not promote
Hello! I reached out to the mods and got their approval to post this story our AI reporter published on the weekend. Below you'll find a snippet and I have a paywall-free link at the bottom of this post to read the rest of this story.
>The story of how Simon Eskildsen moved from Denmark to Ottawa and came to run one of the most intriguing companies in artificial intelligence today can be traced to the moment he dropped his iPhone as a teenager and broke the screen. Rather than buy a new one, he picked up an old Nokia phone and enjoyed a world free from a blinking, distracting device. “I feel it has had no major impact on my life to leave it behind,” he wrote on his website.
>This was 2013, before tech detox memoirs were an established genre. His post surfaced on Hacker News, earned a shout-out from the New York Times, and, in his telling, caught the eye of Shopify recruiters who later offered him an internship. He had a precocious online presence, with blog posts about coding competitions and LinkedIn-style lessons from the 30 most productive days of his life. (“I quickly found out that I am already very productive and it proved difficult to cram in more things,” he wrote.)
>He knew of Shopify but had never heard of its hometown of Ottawa. Still, at 18, he moved across the ocean to work as an intern, intending to complete a gap year. When he visited the office, however, he knew: “These are my people,” he recalled recently.
>Mr. Eskildsen, 31, is still in Ottawa and assembling his own crew of like-minded people to build Turbopuffer Inc., one of the fastest-growing startups in Canada that you’ve probably never heard of, unless you’ve needed its services. The company has devised a new, efficient way for AI systems to search for information when serving up answers, a crucial feature for AI to be useful, while slashing costs for an industry that can’t stop losing money. It’s won Turbopuffer some massive customers, including Anthropic, the company behind Claude, now worth nearly US$1-trillion.
>Turbopuffer is an unusual startup.
>Mr. Eskildsen, its chief executive, started the company in 2023 with Justine Li, whom he met at Shopify. The pair could not appear more different.
>Mr. Eskildsen has the ruddy mien of a Scandinavian athlete and appears to be vibrating with so many thoughts that his head is probably a few degrees warmer than it should be. Ms. Li, 31, has the quiet, wispy vibe of the kid trying to go unnoticed at the back of a classroom. What they share is a polymath’s ability to solve hard problems. “You could throw them into any industry, and they would succeed,” said Dale Neufeld, a former Shopify vice-president.
>At less than three years old, their startup is on track to bring in more than US$100-million in revenue this year from about 1,200 customers, and it’s already profitable. While other startups need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to scale up, Turbopuffer has required less than US$1-million in outside capital. The company has done this with 37 employees, most of whom are abroad, and a cramped Ottawa office down the hall from an online tire retailer, decorated with a solitary Lego-like pufferfish. “I would love to have the luxury of time to design an office,” Mr. Eskildsen said, “but it’s not worth the resources.”
>Turbopuffer might sit more naturally in San Francisco rather than a few blocks from Parliament. While a lot of Canadian talent decamps for Silicon Valley, Mr. Eskildsen has no interest in leaving. He once spent six months in Berlin (“objectively one of the coolest cities on Earth,” he said) and missed running along the Rideau Canal, visiting Gatineau Park and hanging out with friends in the capital. “Turbopuffer has a very strong Canadian heart,” he said. “We want to invest as much as possible in Canada.”
>Now if only he could sell everyone else on Ottawa.