Good morning. Turbopuffer is a little-known Ottawa startup, unless you’re a major AI firm in need of its services – a group that now includes Claude’s Anthropic. The three-year-old company is already on track to bring in $100-million in revenue, though its co-founder was at first reluctant to talk about it. But first:

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Infrastructure: Prime Minister Mark Carney and B.C. Premier David Eby announced a multibillion-dollar deal on major projects.

Real estate: Condo builders have been offering big discounts in exchange for signing NDAs.

Hi, I’m Joe Castaldo, and I write about artificial intelligence for Report on Business.

Since I’ve been writing about tech and AI, I’ve found that most startups are thirsty for media coverage, almost aggressively so. Turbopuffer is an exception.

When I first heard about the company last year, I wasn’t totally sure what it did. Its website was laden with highly technical jargon – not marketing jargon, which is the norm. But its list of customers caught my eye, one in particular: Anthropic.

How, I wondered, did this little-known Ottawa startup with a few dozen employees snag one of the biggest and most important AI companies in the world as a customer?

Co-founder Simon Eskildsen, 31, had the answer, but he wasn’t so easy to pin down. He seemed much happier focusing on the company than talking to a journalist about it. When we finally arranged a video call in January, he was friendly and engaging, and seemed like someone with a keen sense of autobiography. He enthusiastically shared his story of leaving his native Denmark at 18, working for Shopify in Ottawa and starting Turbopuffer in 2023 with Justine Li, whom he met at the e-commerce giant.

Turbopuffer, he explained, had devised a new, less expensive way for AI systems to search for information when serving up answers. Fast, efficient search is crucial for AI chatbots and applications to be useful, ensuring they have relevant context to answer your questions, retrieve the right documents, help with a coding project, or whatever else AI is doing these days. That explained why Anthropic would be interested, at least.

Still, Eskildsen wasn’t sure an article was worth it (hard-core engineers are his target demographic, not Globe and Mail readers) but said he would give it some thought. My Ottawa-based colleague, Sean Silcoff, later met with him to hear more, and see if Eskildsen could be persuaded. Finally, in the spring, he said he was game.

One of his reasons for opening up should tell you a lot about him: He wanted to highlight the International Olympiad in Informatics, an elite annual programming competition that he participated in as a teenager. He wanted more people to know about it, and for Canada to invest more in international math and science competitions for young people. “That would be very, very good for the GDP of the world,” he said.

The reticence to engage with the media isn’t the only unusual thing about Turbopuffer, as I learned through my reporting. The company is less than three years old, profitable and on track to bring in more than US$100-million in revenue this year. It has needed to raise less than US$1-million in outside funding when other startups boast about raising tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And it’s not in Silicon Valley.

Canada is constantly wracked with anxiety over the state of the tech sector, and how we’re losing ground in AI and exporting talent. Turbopuffer, which is providing a key piece of AI infrastructure for major players, is proof that the picture isn’t always so bleak. It just hasn’t been bragging about it. What’s more Canadian than that?

Federal public administration saw the sharpest yearly decline in real GDP in about three decades this April, Statistics Canada says. Meanwhile, federal defence was way up – reflecting a shift in spending by the Carney government.

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