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Simon Eskildsen
Co-founder and CEO · turbopuffer
Search infrastructure Ex-Shopify
Eskildsen built turbopuffer after doing the math on what vector search cost, and set out to make search over every byte affordable.
Simon Eskildsen is co-founder and CEO of turbopuffer, a search engine built on object storage. He started it in 2023 with Justin Li, and its users include Cursor and Notion, according to Software Engineering Daily.
Scaling Shopify's Infrastructure
Eskildsen competed in the International Olympiad in Informatics in high school, The Pragmatic Engineer reported, and then spent eight years on infrastructure at Shopify, working on databases running across regions. He became known for "napkin math," estimating the theoretical limits of compute operations.
Pricing Out Vector Search for Readwise
In 2022 he was helping friends at Readwise scale their infrastructure for article recommendations and semantic search, according to Latent Space. Readwise was paying about $5,000 a month for its database, and vector search would have cost about $20,000 a month, too expensive to ship. In 2023, after mulling over that problem, he decided to build turbopuffer.
