ChalkBloom
About ChalkBloom

We built this because every team we knew was fighting their whiteboard tool.

ChalkBloom is a real-time visual workspace built by two people in Stockholm. We started in 2024 because we’d both spent too many workshops jumping between Miro, Figma, and Zoom — and watching facilitators apologise to the room every time.

The toolbar that became a company.

The two of us worked together at Klarna in 2023, leading two different sides of the same problem: Astrid ran design systems for the merchant-facing product, Jonas ran the multiplayer infrastructure for the in-product collaboration features. Both of us were facilitating quarterly planning sessions across distributed teams.

Every workshop, the same five minutes of toolbar-archaeology. “Who has edit access?” “Why is the sticky note rotated?” “Hold on, the Miro is frozen.” “Can someone share the Figma link in chat?”

We started prototyping over weekends in February 2024. By April we had something that ran our team’s own retros. By June we had a private beta with eleven companies. By month four we were customer-funded.

"If a senior facilitator has to apologise for the tool, the tool is the problem."

What it turned into.

ChalkBloom keeps a small surface: sticky notes, shapes, connectors, frames, drawings, video huddles. That’s the toolbar. Everything else is the canvas.

The opinionated bit is the multiplayer engine. We rebuilt CRDTs from scratch around board-shaped data so that conflict resolution works the way you’d expect — sticky notes don’t end up in two places, arrows stay attached to the things they connect, the room never goes out of sync. We presented some of this work at SREcon Europe in 2025.

How we run the company.

We’re two people. We’re bootstrapped. We’ve been customer-funded since month four. Our growth target is “cover salaries, reinvest the rest, hire when the support inbox starts feeling heavy.” That’s it.

What that means in practice: there’s no growth team. There’s no sales team. We answer email ourselves. Pricing won’t silently increase to hit a quarterly target. We’ll keep the API stable. We’ll deprecate before we remove.

Who we are

Two people, both formerly at companies you’ve heard of.

AL
Astrid Lindqvist
Co-founder · product & design systems

Previously: design systems at Spotify (Stockholm) for 4 years, then merchant-facing platform at Klarna. Wrote the first version of the ChalkBloom canvas over a series of evenings in March 2024 because retros were broken on Miro and she’d run out of patience.

JB
Jonas Bergman
Co-founder · multiplayer infra

Previously: real-time collaboration at Klarna for 5 years, before that distributed systems at Spotify. Maintains a CRDT library on GitHub. Presented our multiplayer architecture at SREcon Europe 2025. Skis on weekends in winter.

What we’ll keep

Three commitments we won’t walk back.

// canvas

The canvas stays free of clutter.

We won’t add an AI sidebar, a permanent banner, or a “daily tip” popup. The toolbar stays small. The canvas is for your work, not our marketing.

// free

The free tier stays usable.

Free is not a trial. We won’t silently make it worse to push you to a paid tier. If we have to change the numbers, we’ll explain why and grandfather existing accounts.

// small

The team stays small.

We’re hiring slowly — one engineer in late 2026. We aren’t targeting series-A scale. The product gets better because the people building it have time to think.