Vector Search has become a foundational technology for AI applications, enabling everything from

SymantecoteCode Search to contextual retrieval for large language models.

However, a major challenge with vector databases has been the cost as data storage scales.

TurboPuffer is a vector database that focuses on speed, cost, and scalability.

It was created by Simon Harube Eskelson and Justin Lee in 2023 and has seen adoption from

high-profile companies such as cursor and notion. Simon joins the podcast with Gregorvan to discuss

the origin of TurboPuffer, its unique technical design, the economics

of vector storage, and more. Gregor Vand is a CTO and founder, currently working at the intersection

of communication, security, and AI, and is based in Singapore. His latest venture, Wintick.aI,

reimagines what email can be in the AI era. For more on Gregor,

find him at van.hk or on LinkedIn.

Hello, welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Simon Eskilsen. Thank you for having me, Gregor.

Yeah, great to have you here, Simon. We're here today to talk all about Turbo puffer, which is a company some of our audience may have heard of equally,

maybe quite a few haven't yet, and there's going to be why we're here today and talking all about it. However, you probably are using this product behind the scenes without you realizing.

So we're going to get into that as well. But I think to begin with, Simon, you've got a really

interesting kind of backstory, and we always dive into those with our guests. So just maybe

talk us through very briefly how you kind of got to TurboPuffer, and I'll just call out. You did

spend quite a chunk of time at Shopify, and I think that would be interesting to understand how

that's helped lead into what TurboPuffer is today as well.

Yeah, that's right. I started my career at Shopify and moved to Canada as a result where

Shopify was built. I moved from Denmark where I grew up and worked on infrastructure at Shopify

for almost a decade. When I joined in 2013, it was in the hundreds of requests per second.

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