Seeing the Big Picture
From tldraw experiments to FAL’s $125M Series C, how sketches turned into billion-dollar infrastructure for generative media.
Posted by David Thyresson • 6 min read
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Seeing the Big Picture
How a sketch turns into a canvas, and a canvas into a movement.
From Rough Lines to Vast Landscapes
What if the next billion-dollar company doesn’t start with a pitch deck, but with a doodle? What if the most transformative opportunities in AI are hiding inside the simplest of drawings?
At PWV, we pay close attention to what our portfolio companies are building—and sometimes, what they’re experimenting with blows us away. That was the case with a few strokes in a collaborative drawing tool, made by Steve Ruiz at tldraw, which opened up a perspective on how small acts of creativity can scale into enormous generative opportunities.
This is a story of how seeing the big picture sometimes means starting with the smallest sketch.
The Relationship Behind the Lines
Our portfolio connection with Steve Ruiz wasn’t born out of chasing hype. tldraw felt like the kind of product that distilled playfulness and utility: part whiteboard, part sketchbook, part design lab.
Steve and the tldraw community were also pushing the boundaries of what “a drawing tool” could be. In late 2023, they launched experiments like Make it Real, which let users turn rough sketches into functional interfaces, and Draw Fast, a playful spin on rapid visual prototyping.
Here’s where the story bends: Draw Fast was powered by FAL. A doodle in tldraw piped into FAL’s inference engine became something more than a sketch—it became a living demonstration of how generative infrastructure could transform hand-drawn lines into rendered possibilities.
That link didn’t go unnoticed. In November 2023, I shared the experiment internally, noting the FAL integration. Soon after, FAL’s founder Görkem Yurtseven picked up on it. What began as a creative side project between tools suddenly connected two founders and two visions: the lightweight sketching ethos of tldraw and the high-performance generative infrastructure of FAL.
By January 2024, conversations with FAL co-founder Burkay Gür revealed just how expansive that vision was. Burkay was clear-eyed: generative AI wouldn’t just augment media—it would eventually replace traditional pipelines altogether. He saw that while foundational model companies were racing ahead with training, the harder challenge would come later: delivering those models at scale to millions of end-users. That, he explained, was practically an entirely new company in itself. And that company, in his view, was FAL—built with deep expertise in inference and scale.
By February 2024, we moved from observing to participating, investing in FAL and deepening the relationship. In retrospect, the seeds of that decision were visible in those playful tldraw demos—and in the founders’ bold conviction that generative media was not a side story, but the story.
Enter: FAL
Through that portfolio relationship came the opportunity to invest in FAL—originally Facts and Labels. What started as a project around labeling and structuring data has evolved into something much more ambitious: a generative platform redefining the creative stack.
If tldraw taught us how rough sketches could be a powerful starting point, FAL showed us how those sketches—and any simple input—could be expanded into full-fledged, multimodal outputs. What tldraw does for collaboration and visual thinking, FAL does for imagination at scale. A line, a word, a gesture—suddenly transformed into a rich, living artifact.
A Fresh Stroke: Highlights from FAL’s Series C Raise
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In July 2025, FAL closed a $125 million Series C round led by Meritech, with strategic participation from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures, and the Google AI Futures Fund, bringing their total funding to $197 million.
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That funding push coincided with a valuation of roughly $1.5 billion, underscoring the market’s belief in FAL’s role as the backbone of generative media infrastructure.
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Underneath the headline numbers: FAL’s platform already serves over 1 million developers and 100+ enterprise customers, generating billions of AI-created assets monthly—and revenue that surged more than 50% in just the two months before the raise.
Seeing Beyond the Sketch
Startups often look like sketches: incomplete, fragile, more promise than product. But if you’ve sat with enough of them, you start to notice when a line isn’t just a line—it’s the seed of something larger.
tldraw gave us practice in seeing how rough strokes can hold deep potential. FAL revealed how those strokes could evolve into entire canvases. And now, with institutional capital and enterprise scale behind it, that canvas is expanding in real time.
That’s the through-line: investing not just in the picture we see today, but in the picture that could emerge tomorrow.
The Bigger Picture
When people ask how PWV finds opportunities, I think back to this path—from Steve’s tool to FAL’s vision—and realize it’s less about prediction, more about perspective.
Opportunities don’t always arrive looking like billion-dollar markets. Sometimes they arrive looking like doodles.
And that’s the point: experiments like Make it Real and Draw Fast remind us that play can be a portal, sketches can be seeds, and small hacks can hint at world-changing infrastructure. Our job is to notice when a rough line contains the outline of an entirely new canvas.
To see not just what is in front of us, but what it could become. To make it real. To draw fast. To see the big picture.
PS
Yes, the above hero image was generated using fal and the fal-ai/flux/schnell model using the prompt:
A wide 16:9 illustration showing the transformation from a simple doodle into a rich, expansive scene — symbolizing “seeing the big picture in AI.”
On the left, a very rough childlike pencil sketch of a small apple tree with just a few lines and circles. In the middle, the sketch grows more defined: branches, shading, and apples beginning to appear. On the right, it blossoms into a fully detailed, colorful apple tree in a lush orchard landscape, with sunlight, sky, and depth — representing growth, creativity, and possibility.
The composition should smoothly flow from rough and simple to vibrant and complete, capturing the metaphor of small beginnings leading to world-changing visions. Warm, natural, organic colors. Gentle, inspiring, hopeful.
Negative Prompt:
No futuristic neon, no sci-fi, no robots, no digital grids, no circuit boards, no overly abstract shapes. Avoid cold or sterile imagery. Keep it natural, warm, and human.