history
the company, sourced and dated — the drawing-app experiments, the sponsorware launch, the viral fortnight, and the license-key era.
the drawing-app experiments2020–2021
a painter turned design engineer ships taste-driven canvas libraries — perfect-arrows, perfect-freehand, globs.design — then starts 'a tiny little drawing app' as sponsorware and opens it to everyone in november 2021.
- 2020the perfect-* librariessteve ruiz's pre-tldraw run: state-designer, a statecharts library with its own visual ide, whose arrow-routing work spawns perfect-arrows (~2.8k stars, launched via july 2020 tweet threads); perfect-freehand, the pressure-sensitive ink library later adopted by excalidraw — 'christopher had me implement in excalidraw' — plus perfect-cursors, gotcha, and a telestrator experiment.
- 2021-03-12globs.designthe globs.design repo is created — a globs-based vector editor. ruiz: 'tldraw mostly grew out of another project of mine (globs.design).'
- 2021-05-09the repo is createdthe tldraw/tldraw repo is created — 'a tiny little drawing app.' the site is sponsorware: gated to github sponsors, reportedly ~211 sponsors at ~$1,700/mo when it opens.
- 2021-07full-time, adobe declinedruiz quits play to work on tldraw full-time, funded by contracting savings. adobe had offered him a job after his spring-2021 open-source work drew inbound from 'any infinite canvas related creative product' — he asked to defer six months, then turned adobe down entirely. 'he turned down adobe on a friday.'
- 2021-10-13the sponsorware postthe first hacker news post documents the sponsorware state: tldraw.com accessible only to github sponsors. 3 points.
- 2021-11-18the public launchopened to everyone mid-november; hits the hn front page — 471 points, 111 comments. mit licensed; multiplayer on a pre-release liveblocks build; a vs code extension already shipped; the monorepo carries @tldraw/core, @tldraw/tldraw, @tldraw/vec, @tldraw/intersect, and an electron app. the name is a play on tl;dr — 'tl;dr aw.'
the company forms2022–2023
the project becomes a company: founded february 2022, first hires, a $2.7m lux-led seed announced with the beta, and the v2 rewrite that replaces the original app.
- 2022-02tldraw incorporatedthe company is founded — 'founder — feb 2022' per linkedin; the company page says 'founded by steve ruiz in 2022.' later texts name both tldraw gb ltd and tldraw, inc.
- 2022-06the first senior engineerdavid sheldrick joins as the first senior engineer — ex-artsy and pulley, author of patch-package; he will co-create signia and lead much of the sync/store engine work.
- 2022-09the early benchthe early bench forms: jamie blair joins as frontend dev in september; lu wilson (todepond, ex-ink & switch, sandspiel) joins in november. work on the v2 rewrite is already underway.
- 2022-11-30the $2.7m seedthe 'new tldraw' public beta opens at beta.tldraw.com — and a $2.7m seed is announced, led by lux capital with amplify partners and angels including guillermo rauch, tom preston-werner, soleio, adam wiggins (muse), cristóbal valenzuela, johannes schickling, david khourshid, brian lovin. the named team: sheldrick, blair, wilson, dytrych, shaikh, bezenšek, pai.
- 2022-12-16the techcrunch profiletechcrunch profiles the company: five full-time employees, no revenue beyond github sponsors, multiplayer rooms with no login — framed against figjam inside the pending adobe–figma deal, miro, and apple's week-old freeform.
- 2023-03-02signiasignia — the v2 rewrite's reactive state library — is released standalone under mit, co-authored by ruiz and sheldrick.
- 2023-04-04the v2 relaunchthe rewrite leaves beta and replaces the app at tldraw.com, per the march 20 re-launch notice. v1 is preserved at old.tldraw.com 'until the end of time,' later moved to the tldraw/tldraw-v1 repo under mit.
- 2023-08taha hassan joinstaha hassan joins as software developer — make real, the 'carry on' canvas autocomplete, accessibility work — through ~november 2024.
the sdk business2024–2025
the sdk becomes the business: v2 stable, the watermark compromise, sync, tldraw computer with google deepmind, and a $10m series a on ~$1m of license revenue.
- 2024-02-29sdk 2.0 stabletldraw sdk v2.0.0 stable — 'initial public release… ready for production.'
- 2024a head of engineeringmime čuvalo joins as head of engineering — ex-youtube, dropbox, google; the firessh author.
- 2024carry on and teachthe agent experiments continue off-product: 'carry on' canvas autocomplete (lu wilson on claude haiku, taha hassan on a local llama3 8b) and 'teach' — a summer project where an agent manipulates the canvas, built by ruiz, wilson, and engineer-in-residence orion reed.
- 2024-08-05tldraw synctldraw sync is announced — a self-hosted sync product, the sdk's first add-on module, included with the tldraw license; a cloudflare template; a demo server that wipes data after 24h. the company claims 400k+ users and 200k shared projects on tldraw.com (self-reported).
- 2024-09-13the watermark compromisesdk v3.0.0 ships the watermark model: commercial use permitted with a 'made with tldraw' watermark; a business license removes it — 'meant to make the sdk more accessible to small teams and independent developers with commercial products.' a softening of the december 2023 line, not a reversal.
- 2024-12-18tldraw computertldraw computer opens after a december 13 waitlist — natural-language node-and-wire workflows on the canvas, built in partnership with google / google deepmind for the gemini 2.0 launch window. it stays closed source; issue #5122 says starter kits are the answer instead.
- 2025-04-09the $10m series aa $10m series a, led by lux capital and definition. the post reports ~$1m of first-year license revenue (clickup, padlet, craft, jam; autodesk per linkedin), ~67k x followers, ~8k discord, and a team of 'nearly twenty people.' total raised ≈ $14.7m.
the license-key era2025–
production needs a license key: sdk 4.0 gates the sdk, fairies run for one december, external prs get auto-closed over ai slop — and the demos keep shipping.
- 2025-09-18sdk 4.0 gates productionsdk 4.0: an npm create tldraw cli, five mit-licensed starter kits, wcag 2.2 aa accessibility work with sarah fossheim — and license-key enforcement. development stays free; production requires a key, with a 100-day trial license. 'fate and capital both demand that tldraw be a sustainable project.'
- 2025-11-19sdk 4.2sdk 4.2 ships — the cadence continues under the new licensing model.
- 2025-12-01fairiesfairies — visible multi-agent ai collaborators — land on tldraw.com as a deliberately time-boxed experiment: $25 one-time, december 2025 only, code public in the repo. lu wilson's launch video calls it 'the weirdest and most ambitious project'; a december 19 writeup covers the 'fairy management system' orchestration.
- 2025-12lu wilson leaveslu wilson leaves tldraw after three years — from january 2026, prototyping contributor tools for wikimedia and wikipedia.
- 2026-01-15the ai-slop firewalltldraw pauses external contributions — issue #7695 announces auto-closing of external prs after a surge of ai-generated submissions. ruiz's follow-up, 'stay away from my trash!', concedes the irony that tldraw's own /issue claude code command authored some of the bad directions; he notes excalidraw's pr volume more than doubled q4-2025 vs q3.
- 2026-02-25the tests-to-closed-source jokethe 'move tests to closed source' issue gets reported at face value — then revealed as a joke. ruiz: 'moving our tests into another repo would complicate and slow down our development… tldraw itself may eventually be a vibe coded alternative to tldraw.' a discourse event about ai cloning, not a policy change.
- 2026-03-03the mcp app postruiz posts 'tldraw mcp app: letting your agents draw' — the canvas as an mcp surface.
- 2026-05-07sdk 5.0sdk 5.0 — a feature-heavy release around customization, performance, and extension. 'we shipped our backlog.'
- 2026-07-16tldraw offlinetldraw offline launches — a free, file-based desktop app (.tldraw files, no accounts or server, scripting and agent access) for macos, windows, and linux. the company reports 16k+ downloads in the first week (self-reported); multiplayer follows august 13.
- 2026-09-10tldraw flashtldraw flash — a hand-drawn lo-fi animation tool: record-drag motion, a timeline, export. built largely by interns audrey leo and leo knudsen with max drake and daniel lefcourt.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.