Razvan Haiduc, Relum: “We’re trying to build something that learns from the behaviour of real-time players”

Shows & conferences - 14 October, 2026

Relum’s bet on regulated markets has paid off, and artificial intelligence is the next focus, Razvan Haiduc, CPO at Relum, told Focus Gaming News at SBC Summit Lisbon 2026.

Haiduc recalled that a year earlier he had said the company would concentrate on regulation, and “I wasn’t lying”. Relum has since gone live in most of regulated LatAm and much of regulated Europe, and at the time of the interview was working on South Africa, finishing the UK and starting Portugal and Italy. The company achieved this without growing headcount much, investing instead in its people. He described regulated markets as complex “in terms of compliance and politics”, as Brazil recently showed, but said operators are keen to work with providers that hold the licences, since “there are slim pickings”.

What sets Relum apart, he argued, is reach. Many aggregators serve unregulated markets, where the main requirement is clients and contracts, while Relum says it has around 350 vendors live and 50,000 to 60,000 games, and is “new and very agile”. Rather than one market a quarter, he said, it is launching “five, six markets a quarter easy”.

On content, Haiduc said Relum’s philosophy is to “integrate everybody” rather than curate. “We don’t know where the next big vendor comes from,” he explained, so the company aims to put vendors live on as many operators as possible and lets operators decide what works. Local and regional vendors, he noted, only make revenue in their own markets, so the portfolio must grow alongside the markets.

 

Looking ahead, he predicted that next year would be “the year of AI”, a buzzword he said he hates. Last year, he argued, AI was not ready; now Relum is developing features that use anonymised historical and real-time transaction data from the Digitain group to understand player behaviour and churn, and to decide when to communicate and when to hold back. The aim is a product that is “humane enough but also profitable enough”. Haiduc was cautious about the outcome: Relum is testing slowly, and if the results are “just a marketing blurb”, it will drop the project. In regulated markets, he added, the AI must also reflect player protection rules and marketing consents.