Avanti Studios has just closed a EUR 5 million funding round, taking its total seed capital to EUR 10 million. The timing’s crucial: they’re preparing to launch their first live casino games later this month. What the investment really signals is serious appetite among backers for alternative approaches to live gaming. Technology that can scale beyond the constraints of traditional studio operations. That’s the bet being placed here.

Established Players Back the Startup

The funding lineup carries real weight. Genting Casinos UK backed Avanti’s initial round and is returning as a repeat investor. That’s a meaningful endorsement from an operator with decades of land-based experience. In a sector where credibility and industry relationships are everything, continuity from an established player like that matters.

Co-founders Gustaf Hagman and Jonas Delin have framed the new capital differently to how you might expect. It’s not about short-term momentum. It’s about building the infrastructure for a fundamentally different type of live supplier. The pair are positioning Avanti as a play on what they see as inevitable: a shift in player expectations.

Motion Capture Meets AI and Real-Time Rendering

Avanti’s core proposition is clever. The platform combines motion capture of real dealers with AI and 3D rendering to create digital croupiers that host games in real time. What you get is the removal of several constraints that plague traditional live studios: physical table limits, staffing bottlenecks, and the geography problem of offering games in multiple languages simultaneously.

Operators can launch multiple customised tables instantly. Adjust game pace, difficulty, or presentation without any human dealer constraints. In theory, this addresses player friction points. Human error. Game speed. That somewhat mechanical feel of some existing live offerings.

First Games Live This Month, Spain Already on Board

Timing matters here. First commercial deployment is lined up for Spain via operator Luckia.es, with broader regulated market access secured through a partnership with Light & Wonder. These aren’t announcement-only deals. Real money games are going live within weeks. That puts Avanti in a position to actually prove the concept rather than just talk about it.

Whether players genuinely prefer digital humans over real dealers remains an open question, frankly. The market is crowded with established live suppliers, and adoption isn’t guaranteed. But investors appear confident enough to let Avanti answer that question with real product and real player data. That’s where things get interesting.

What the team thinks

Philippa Ashworth says:

Baz has rightly identified the strategic significance of this round, but I’d argue the real story here extends beyond Avanti’s funding alone, it represents a broader institutional validation that AI-driven scaling in live gaming is no longer speculative but investable. What’s particularly noteworthy is that established operators like Genting are backing this technology rather than building it in-house, suggesting they recognize genuine competitive advantages in outsourcing innovation to specialized studios. The timing is crucial too, as regulatory environments worldwide are becoming more receptive to automated hosting solutions, which could compress Avanti’s path to profitability significantly faster than traditional live gaming models.