In an interview with European Gaming, Gustaf Hagman, co-founder of Avanti Studios, explains where the certified RNG ends and the rendered dealer begins, how the supplier cleared live blackjack in Spain, what persuaded bet365 and Entain to sign early, and how it keeps Genting’s roles as investor and customer apart.
Key findings
- On rebuilding live casino: ‘The underlying production model hasn’t fundamentally changed in nearly two decades.’
- On the RNG: ‘The outcome of every hand is determined by a certified RNG.’
- On player acceptance: ‘Technology on its own doesn’t create engagement.’
- On capacity: ‘If an operator wants fifty tables rather than five … that becomes a question of production capacity.’
- On human dealers: ‘We’re capturing what they do and giving it a much larger reach than one table can.’
- On advice to founders: ‘If you can’t find anyone who wants the problem solved badly enough to spend time on it with you, that is information.’
Why live casino needed rebuilding
European Gaming: You and Jonas Delin have spent your careers on both sides of the live casino model you’re now setting out to replace. What did you see up close that convinced you it needed rebuilding rather than improving?
Gustaf Hagman: The traditional live casino model has been an incredible success, and we have enormous respect for what companies like Evolution have built. They created an entirely new category. But now it’s time for a change.
What became increasingly clear to us is that the underlying production model hasn’t fundamentally changed in nearly two decades. It still relies on physical studios, cameras, dealers and tables, and all of the operational complexity that comes with that.
So we asked ourselves a different question: if live casino were invented today, with today’s technology, would anyone choose to build it the same way? We don’t think so.
Advances in real–time graphics, AI and cloud computing allow us to deliver the same excitement and the same social engagement, while giving possibilities the physical model simply can’t reach.
‘The goal isn’t to replace live casino overnight, it’s to build what we believe is its natural next evolution.’
Where the RNG ends and the live element begins
EG: Your dealers are motion-captured and AI-rendered. Walk me through a single hand of blackjack: where does the live element end and the RNG begin?
Gustaf Hagman: The outcome of every hand is determined by a certified RNG. That is a genuine difference from traditional live casino, where the cards are physical, and it’s deliberate – it means every outcome is auditable to the same standard as any other certified game.
Once the outcome has been generated, our real-time engine takes over. Every card movement, dealer animation, facial expression, moment of eye contact and spoken interaction is rendered live in Unreal Engine and synchronised across every player at the table.
‘So the outcome comes from the RNG, but the presentation is live, dynamic and shared. Everyone at the table sees the same dealer, the same sequence of events and the same result at the same moment.’
In blackjack, you still make your own decisions in real time, and the dealer responds to them as they happen. It’s a combination of proven gaming integrity and the real-time technology used to build AAA games.
Whether players will accept a digital dealer
EG: What’s the failure mode that worries you most, where the technology performs exactly as designed but players simply don’t warm to a digital dealer?
Gustaf Hagman: That’s probably the biggest question we asked ourselves before starting the company. Technology on its own doesn’t create engagement.
‘Players don’t care whether something is AI-powered or rendered in Unreal Engine. They care whether it feels enjoyable, trustworthy and genuinely live. That’s why we have spent so much time on realism.’
Every facial movement, every gesture, every interaction has to feel natural. If a player forgets they’re interacting with a digital human a few minutes in, we’ve done our job.
Ultimately, the market will decide, and it hasn’t decided yet. The early feedback from both operators and players has been very encouraging.
How live blackjack was cleared in Spain
EG: Spain has historically permitted only live roulette, yet you’re launching with Toro vs. Matador Live and Live Blackjack. How did you get those cleared?
Gustaf Hagman: Spain has a well-defined regulatory framework, and we’ve worked closely with our certification partners and our operators throughout the approval process.
Rather than trying to fit into an existing category, we set out to demonstrate that our games meet the same standards around fairness, integrity and player protection as any other certified product.
In some respects, the model makes that easier to evidence. There are no physical cards to handle and no manual dealing process, so there are fewer points at which human error can enter the execution of a game. What you get instead is a highly consistent and fully auditable environment.
We’re grateful for the constructive dialogue with everyone involved, and pleased that Spain will be the first regulated market where this category is available to players.
Why bet365 and Entain signed early
EG: bet365 and Entain both signed within months of launch, before a single game went live. What convinced them to commit that early, and what did you have to give up to land them?
Gustaf Hagman: Both of them had seen enough of the traditional model to know exactly where its limits are. If you’re a tier-one operator, the constraints on live casino are the same everywhere:
- A table costs what it costs to staff
- A new language means a new recruitment drive
- And a low-stakes table rarely covers its own overheads
That isn’t a criticism of the studios. It’s simply what physical production does to your economics.
What we showed them was a production model where those constraints don’t apply in the same way.
‘If an operator wants fifty tables rather than five, or a stake level that would never survive in a studio, or a dealer speaking a particular language for a particular market, that becomes a question of production capacity rather than property, recruitment and training.’
The wider trend helped too. Digital humans are already presenting the news, reading the weather and working as influencers. Operators can see that arriving in this industry, and they would rather be early to it than late.
They also weren’t buying a slide deck. Jonas has built live casino studios and knows better than most what it costs to open one; I spent years on the operator side working out which supplier roadmaps were real and which weren’t. Both of us came with a track record their teams could go and check.
As for what we gave up, not much beyond time and a lot of transparency.
We opened the technology up to them early, including the parts that weren’t finished, and we took the feedback seriously enough to change things because of it.
Signing before launch means an operator is taking a view on whether you’ll deliver, so you have to be willing to be examined properly.
Keeping Genting’s investor and customer roles apart
EG: Genting acquired Authentic from you and has now backed Avanti twice. How do you stop an investor that close from becoming a customer you can’t afford to say no to?
Gustaf Hagman: It’s a fair question, which we’ve been conscious of since day one. The honest answer is that we keep the two relationships separate.
Genting are an investor in Avanti. Where they’re also a commercial customer, that’s a commercial conversation on the same terms as anyone else, the same pricing logic, the same position in the roadmap and the same treatment as any other operator.
An investor who wants preferential product decisions isn’t a good investor, and that has never been how Genting have approached it.
There’s a structural protection in the model as well.
Most of the pressure you’re describing comes from scarcity. In a traditional studio business, capacity is finite, so every table you give to one operator is a table another one doesn’t get, and the largest relationship in the room tends to win that argument. We’re not allocating scarce studio space, which removes a lot of that tension before it starts.
What happens to human dealers
EG: Your technology exists to take the staffed studio out of the equation. What happens to the human dealers it replaces?
Gustaf Hagman: We don’t see technology as replacing people so much as changing where people create value.
‘А traditional live casino requires thousands of people performing the same operational tasks every day. Digital production creates demand for a different mix of talent: artists, animators, AI engineers, Unreal developers, technical directors and motion capture performers.’
And the platform is built on human performance in a fairly literal sense. The dealers players see began as experienced land-based croupiers in a motion capture suit, and everything from how they handle the cards to the small habits between hands comes from them.
We’re not taking the human out of the product. We’re capturing what they do and giving it a much larger reach than one table can.
Advice for founders taking on an entrenched vertical
EG: For a founder reading this who believes they’ve built something that can disrupt an entrenched iGaming vertical, what’s the one thing you’d tell them to do differently from how you did it?
Gustaf Hagman: Start with the problem, not the technology. It’s very easy to fall in love with what you’ve built, but customers don’t buy technology. They buy solutions to problems. If I had to name one thing we’d do differently, it’s that we would put the product in front of operators earlier than we did.
We did validate the idea. We spent a long time asking operators whether they actually wanted a different production model before we committed to building one. But there’s a real difference between asking people whether they like an idea and putting something imperfect in front of them and watching what they do with it. We waited longer than we needed to for the technology to be presentable, because when you’re introducing a new category, it feels like you only get one first impression.
That instinct is understandable and mostly wrong. Operators in this industry are commercially sharp, and they’ve seen a lot of suppliers turn up making big claims. They’re far better at spotting the gap between a demo and a product than most founders assume, and in our experience, they’re willing to help close it if you let them see the work early.
The sharpest input we’ve had has come from operator product teams, and we would have had it sooner if we’d asked sooner.
The less comfortable part is what it tells you when nobody engages. If you can’t find anyone who wants the problem solved badly enough to spend time on it with you, that is information. Founders tend to read that silence as an education problem; the market hasn’t understood them yet.
Occasionally, that’s true. More often it isn’t.
About Avanti Studios
Avanti Studios is a Stockholm-based live casino supplier founded by Gustaf Hagman, co-founder of LeoVegas, and Jonas Delin, founder of Authentic Gaming. The company motion-captures experienced land-based croupiers and combines the recordings with AI, 3D animation, and Unreal Engine to produce digital dealers that host real-time multiplayer games, with outcomes determined by a certified RNG. It went live in Spain with Luckia in 2026 and has since signed agreements with operators including bet365, Entain, and Superbet.
