Canvas 1.0 History

This is the history of Canvas 1.0. Canvas has since returned as an all new, headless canvas platform. Read about the current tool on the Canvas page.

Canvas, previously known as Vulcan, was Beach's realtime collaborative whiteboard. Teams gathered on a shared visual surface to think together: mapping ideas, sketching flows, aligning around problems, and leaving a spatial record of collective sensemaking.

In category terms, it sat alongside Miro and Mural. Vulcan was an early pioneer in extensible visual canvas: a platform teams could build on, not just draw on.

The Beach Way has always held that the best work happens when people explore together. Documents and decks capture conclusions. Canvases capture the thinking: the messy, spatial, collaborative process of getting to those conclusions.

We built Vulcan because we believed visual collaboration should be open and extensible. Teams should be able to adapt the canvas to their quest, not fit their quest into a fixed template. Realtime presence, shared cursors, infinite space, and room for third-party extensions: these were the primitives we cared about.

Vulcan led directly to nearly five years at Mural, first as Head of Platform, then as Head of Ventures. I joined when the company had around 80 people and left after it had grown to roughly 1,000, at a $2bn valuation.

That experience shaped Beach profoundly. I saw what it takes to build and scale a platform in the visual collaboration category: the infrastructure, the partnerships, the product bets, and the relentless pace of a market that never stands still.

Canvas was the digital expression of the campfire. A place where a group gathers, shares what they have discovered, challenges assumptions, and creates shared understanding through visible collaboration.

Quests need direction. Expeditions need progress. Campfires need a hearth. For a time, Vulcan was ours: the spatial surface where understanding became collective rather than individual.

The visual collaboration category has become crowded. Miro, Mural, FigJam, and others now serve millions of users with mature platforms and deep ecosystems. Building a competitive standalone canvas from scratch no longer represented the best use of Beach's focus.

More importantly, the demands of the category were evolving rapidly. Teams were adjusting to human-AI collaboration: agents on the canvas, AI-generated artefacts, new patterns of sensemaking that the original whiteboard model was not designed for. The next vision for this space was not yet clear enough to build against.

So we deprecated Vulcan. Rather than maintain our own canvas, we favoured integrations with the market-dominant solutions our customers already used. Visual collaboration remained close to our hearts. We said that when we had a new vision for what this space should become in an AI-native world, we would return to it.

That vision arrived. Canvas is back, rebuilt from the ground up as a headless canvas platform: a high-performance WebGL and WebGPU infinite surface, a CRDT data store, realtime collaboration, extensible objects, and facilitation built for an AI-native world. See where the story goes next on the Canvas page.