About SketchAlchemy

SketchAlchemy turns handwritten sketches — whiteboard photos, iPad and Apple Pencil notes, reMarkable exports, paper scans — into clean, editable Excalidraw and Obsidian scenes. It is built and run by one person: Stefan Lago, a software developer in Untersiggenthal, Switzerland, trading as Abstraction Systems.

Who builds it

Stefan has been writing software for more than three decades, as a software engineer in fields as different as aerospace, medical research, astronomy and finance — including work on Roche's cobas 6800/8800 diagnostic systems. Much of it has been .NET enterprise applications, with a focus on desktop user interfaces (WPF) and GUI design.

His interest in artificial intelligence goes back a long way: in 1990 he published Einführung in Salix Prolog, an introduction to Prolog. The Prolog era was an early phase on the path to artificial intelligence; SketchAlchemy builds on today's generative models.

Why SketchAlchemy exists

Handwritten diagrams are quick to draw and slow to reuse. A photo of a whiteboard can't be edited or searched, and tools that re-vectorise a sketch turn it into tidy generic shapes that no longer look like what you drew. SketchAlchemy rebuilds the sketch as real Excalidraw elements in the same place, size and colour, so it stays recognisably yours while becoming editable, searchable and linkable — in Excalidraw or inside an Obsidian vault.

How it works

Your images are processed in Google Cloud and converted by Google's Gemini models. The output is AI-generated and can contain misreads, which is why every box, label and arrow comes back as a separate, editable object rather than a flat image. Payments are handled by Paddle as merchant of record. See the Privacy Notice for what data is processed where.

Contact

Support, feedback and privacy requests: support@sketchalchemy.io. Legal details are in the Terms.