Topia

Daniel Liebskin had been building real-time communication platforms since 2015, working with Web Real-Time Communication technology and peer-to-peer encrypted tunnels. But the spark for Topia came in 2020 when COVID-19 shut down the world. Burning Man, the iconic annual festival, faced an existential crisis—they couldn't hold their event in person. Liebskin and his team advised Burning Man on how to build a virtual world, and eventually became co-hosts. The result: over 25,000 people attended the virtual Burning Man experience, just five months after Topia wrote its first line of code.

Topia formally launched in 2020, though Liebskin had been iterating on the underlying technology for years. The platform is built on Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) with peer-to-peer encrypted tunnels between browsers—a decentralized approach that prioritizes privacy and user agency. Initially, the team didn't even turn on revenue generation until August or September 2020, just before Burning Man. They started with a simple model: world ownership at $9 per month, allowing users to create unique URLs (like /Nathan) where they could bring unlimited people together.

The Burning Man event was the breakthrough moment. Having 25,000 people on the platform five months after launch created immediate credibility and inbound investor interest. This led to a friends and family note round of $600,000, closed in about two weeks. The traction caught the attention of Alex Sohanian (Reddit founder) and his team at 776, along with Bonfire Ventures and others. After carefully vetting investors for cultural alignment—Liebskin wanted partners who understood the vision of evolving human socialization, not those who would push the company toward unsustainable growth metrics—he closed a $5.2M Series A. Total raised to date: $5.8M.

Liebskin resisted the conventional pressure to chase revenue metrics obsessively. Instead, he focused on building a product people loved and creating network effects. The revenue model evolved into multiple streams: world ownership ($9/month from thousands of users), B2B events (ranging from $100 for small events to $40,000 for large corporate experiences), and recurring B2B subscriptions based on venue capacity ($4 per person, e.g., $400/month for a 100-person capacity). Most importantly, Topia pays 30% of B2B revenue back to the creator ecosystem—confluencers, template curators, and asset creators. This approach aligned with the mission of creating financial independence for creators. By late 2023, they were paying out roughly $2,000-$3,000 per week to creators, with one exceptional day seeing $3,000 in payouts. The B2B side generates significantly more revenue than consumer world ownership, though both streams are important. By 2023, they hadn't yet crossed $1M ARR, but their goal is to break that mark in the coming year.

Topia has evolved into a multi-faceted platform used by companies like Envoy, MIT, Opus, and Octa for employee engagement and community-building. Brands use it for holiday parties, IPO celebrations, all-hands meetings, and happy hours—replacing the informal social fabric lost in remote work. Beyond B2B, thousands of non-business users create and gather in worlds for festivals, art experiences, and pure social connection. The platform hosts 180+ events per week and tracks about 4,000 weekly conversations. Liebskin is exploring NFT integration and API capabilities to make the platform more interoperable and extensible. With early-stage traction, a creator-first revenue model, and investors who genuinely understand the vision, Topia is positioning itself as the infrastructure for how humans will socialize online—neither chasing ad-based attention metrics nor pushing unrealistic growth, but building something sustainable and meaningful.