Avanti Studios: Scalable innovation without an AI revolution

Gustaf, we spoke in July – and you were looking forward to a break from iGaming. We had a feeling you'd be back... 

Gustaf Hagman: I was a little bit tired with the industry during the spring and summer, yes, but then Jonas came along and we started to talk about Avanti and the future. I thought I could be part of something really disruptive again, and I couldn't just stand on the sidelines. I needed to be here. And then during autumn I just felt more and more that Avanti is something truly disruptive, a little bit like LeoVegas back in the day: you're entering the industry with something that everyone wants. The operators want it and the players want it, so I just felt that I to be part of it – and get back into the industry with full energy. 

Jonas, how will the partnership between you and Gustaf work for this venture? Is it yin and yang, what's the setup going to be? 

Jonas Delin: It's a really great combination of backgrounds and skill sets. First of all, we’ve known each other for quite a while. Of course, LeoVentures were involved in Authentic Gaming, which was my previous project, so we have experience working together that way. But I think what's really interesting and one of our key strengths here at Avanti, is that Gustaf has a very broad experience, entrepreneurial skill set and experience from scaling iGaming businesses from the B2C side. He has very deep insight into that whole segment of our business, whereas I come from a more of a B2B background, specifically focusing on live casino. So we bring diverse skill sets to the table, and I think that's really meaningful and will continue to be on this journey. 

GH: I can see things from the operator perspective and all the flaws with current suppliers. Jonas really has the hand-crafted work and that knowledge in the live casino sector. I think that's quite unique for a supplier actually, especially in the live casino world. I think we have a unique position there with our backgrounds and knowledge. 

A two-pronged attack, almost 360-degree approach... Tell us all about the product offering. Are we talking  AI live dealers here?

JD: First of all, I want to jump in quickly and speak about AI. Actually we are using proven technology from the AAA video game industry such as Unreal Engine Meta Human, to produce our clones, and it's not so much AI. There are elements of AI in our product and we see AI playing a bigger part as we move forward but, if we are speaking about the product, there are several aspects. One is that we are producing the games themselves, the actual game engines and mechanics. That's one part of our product. And then another part, we call it the live experience, or I suppose you could call it the presentation layer: what the player actually sees on the stream. There's no AI involved in producing our game engines and game content.

It actually starts with us bringing over experienced land-based croupiers here to Stockholm, where we have built a custom-built motion capture studio. This was first done several months ago. We reached out to some friends in Mayfair and brought over some of their top-calibre dealers who really know the games and know how to behave at the table. We basically sit them down at a blackjack or baccarat table, and they wear what's called a motion capture suit. Then we ask them to deal baccarat hands and blackjack hands, and the output of that is essentially the skeleton of a person, capturing the motions, the mannerisms, general behaviour that the dealer has. It adds authenticity, and it's not just about dealing the cards, but occasionally maybe they fiddle a bit, and we try to capture that to create a level of realism. 

GH: We then use Unreal Engine, various 3D animation tools such as Maya and other cutting-edge systems that are used in the games industry to build the actual characters and also to produce the video streaming for the cloud. There is a little bit of AI in all of this but what we see is that AI could play a bigger part in the future. Our dealers are going to speak multiple languages and actually have dialects and accents. You can have a Texas dialect or something else. And then lastly, but even more importantly, emotions. They will be able to have a personality in the near future. Our key requirement is that our dealers have to be ultra realistic, completely human-looking – and AI is not quite there yet. 

Is it fair to say live casino now is at a crossroads in terms of innovation because, like you say, you can go down the AI dealer route... You guys have decided that's not the route to pursue, but there's obviously demand out there for a new way of providing live casino? Given how much revenue it makes but that it's also been a similar offering for a number of years. 

JD: AI is not there yet if you want to create real lifelikeness. AI might come into play for us in the future and we concluded, at the moment, it could work only if it's pre-recorded. For us, it has to be live. The dealers deal cards in real time. They spin roulette wheels in real time. This is really a key component of live casino and a key reason why players trust live in the first place. I think the best example here is blackjack, where you make your own decisions. So our blackjack will work exactly the same way as it does in a traditional live casino blackjack in that, you and me and Gustaf are all sitting at the table, we get our own cards,  but there's one or two cards for the dealer, and those are going to be the same for all of us. You might stand, Gustaf might split his hand, I might take cards, and that happens in real time. It's not recorded, and the dealer does the dealing in real time. 

In terms of competition and market structure, are you essentially targeting the big players in Evolution, Pragmatic Play and Playtech?  

GH: Of course, yes, we will. 

Simple answer! 

GH: It is a simple answer. I truly believe that Avanti is changing and revitalising the live casino industry in the sense that we are doing something completely new but with the trust of our dealers. As I said, it's not real humans, but they are delivering trust in another way. And, to be honest, in live casino as a supplier, if you're not competing against Evolution and Playtech, you don't have a business because they essentially own the market right now. 

But also if you look at global trends over the past year, you see clones out there presenting news, doing weather forecasts, acting as influencers. Clearly, that trend is coming to this industry and it's coming to this industry now with Avanti. 

You've announced the launch this week – in the next few months, what’s your roadmap for the year ahead? 

JD: Let me start by talking about markets. Your question previously was if we're going to compete head-on with Evolution and the like – and the short answer is yes, but we're also looking to markets where we can make a real difference and solve some significant problems. For that reason, we have decided that Spain is going to be our first regulated market. And the logic is quite simple in that we can fill a gap there that we think we will be the only ones able to solve. That gap is that the Spanish regulator, when it comes to live casino at the moment, only allows live roulette, but we will be able to deliver live blackjack, live baccarat and other games because the dealer layer, if you like, is only a presentation. As far as the regulator is concerned, it's not a live game, and so we are, we are hopeful that we will be the first to be able to offer Spanish players live blackjack. We are in the process of getting a licence for Spain so we are quite far in there. 

GH: Then we're looking into Brazil. It’s going to be interesting. I don't know if Spain or Brazil is going to be the first market, but they are the markets that we're entering first. The reason for Brazil is, first of all, it's a huge market, but secondly, it's a bit of a problem for today's supplier, where you have player value. With Avanti, we're going to be able to build and scale up low-stakes tables. Essentially, you can have as many tables as you want and, with lower stakes, that's going to be a huge USP for Avanti. 

We believe Brazil is not the only market we will be able to do this in, but we should also say about the new regulation coming into effect in Brazil, where all dealers have to be Brazilian Portuguese-speaking. That presents a problem for a traditional live casino in that they need to go and recruit people that can speak that language and so scaling becomes fairly costly and time consuming, involving big operational efforts. In our world it works a little bit differently because we can produce as many tables as we like. It would be very easy for us to add 50 tables or 100 tables, so that presents a big opportunity. 

JD: Following on from Brazil, in 2026 we have an aggressive plan. The ambition is to go into Italy and the Netherlands a little bit later this year, as well as Sweden, Ontario and the UK. That's where we have our vision right now to capture the majority of the regulated markets outside of the US. 

From April in the UK, yours might be a particularly attractive offering given taxes are going up to 40% for online casino... 

JD: I just wanted to add as well, a little bit beyond 2026, a big part of why we actually started up is to solve the scalability issues in the US. In the bigger states, you need to have a local studio.... one in Michigan, another in New Jersey, and then a third one in Pennsylvania. Obviously, opening each studio is a pretty big project, as I probably know better than most. The key game in the US is blackjack and the game players want to play is classic blackjack, where you have your own seat – not the infinite version. Those tables are not scalable and you can only have 7 seats at a table. 

With the high operational cost in the US, this means the limits for those unscalable tables are really high. The minimum bet would be $25 or $50, for example, which of course makes blackjack completely inaccessible to the majority of people in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania. That's one big problem we want to solve, where we can essentially bring a $1 or $5 blackjack table and really widen that market.

Are you confident you won't find any stumbling blocks with the proposition, as US regulators are notoriously stricter to work with than other jurisdictions? 

JD: Yes, early conversations with regulators for European markets have been positive and, actually, unlike other live casinos, we are using a cryptographically strong and secure RNG as the base of producing the results. So, in practice, our live casino doesn’t have risks that are associated with physical hardware and human-involvement – this is typically what regulators will be concerned about when approving traditional live casino products.

GH: A huge trend right now is actually speed in the games. If you enter whichever lobby, the majority of the games are played on a speed blackjack or speed baccarat,  so it's a clear trend and for Avanti it's very easy to speed up the games. We can make all the small things in between, the small chats and everything, much tighter and also the games much more fluid without losing the feeling for the game. So we will be launching the fastest games out there as well. 

Thank you both for your time and, as industry analysts, we’ll be watching to see in which direction the live casino market moves...