Excalidraw
Open-source, hand-drawn-style virtual whiteboard for sketching diagrams, run by a small Czech company.
- Productivity / Design software
- active
- Founded 2020
- Researched Sep 2026
The story
Excalidraw began as a personal open-source project by Meta engineer Christopher Chedeau in January 2020 and grew rapidly through community contributions. By 2021, Czech developers David Luzar and Milos Vetesnik took over day-to-day operations, incorporated Excalidraw s.r.o.
Timeline
Excalidraw created
Christopher Chedeau builds it as a personal side project
Domain registered
excalidraw.com registered shortly after creation
Google web.dev case study
Google developer relations profiles Excalidraw as a PWA reference
Operations move to Czech team
David Luzar and Milos Vetesnik take over day-to-day work
Excalidraw s.r.o. incorporated
Company founded in Brno; launches paid Excalidraw+ to fund development
123,000+ GitHub stars
Open-source repository passes 123,000 stars
Founders
Christopher Chedeau
Original creator (not listed as current company co-founder)
Meta software engineer; co-created React Native and Prettier
David Luzar
Managing Director and Co-founder
Czech developer (GitHub: dwelle); took over Excalidraw operations in early 2021
Milos Vetesnik
Managing Director and Co-founder
Czech developer; co-took over Excalidraw operations and incorporation in 2021
7 sourcesEvery fact above links back to these.
- Excalidraw - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- David Luzar - Crunchbase Person Profilecrunchbase.com
- Excalidraw - Crunchbase Company Profile & Fundingcrunchbase.com
- David Luzar - Co-founder at Excalidraw | LinkedInlinkedin.com
- dwelle (David Luzar) - GitHubgithub.com
- Introducing Excalidraw+ - Excalidraw blogplus.excalidraw.com
- Excalidraw | LinkedInlinkedin.com