WorldwideArgentina (ES)Brasil (PT)Brasil (EN)Canada (EN)Canada (FR)Chile (ES)Colombia (ES)Suomi (FI)Japan (JA)México (ES)México (EN)Perú (ES)Perú (EN)

The Story of Evolution: How a Riga Studio Built Live Casino

Last updated July 2026 · Casino Capybara editorial team

Evolution AB is the largest live-dealer supplier in online gambling, streaming tables and game shows from studios on several continents to operators across the regulated world. It began in 2006 as a small Swedish start-up renting a single studio in Riga; it is now a company listed on Nasdaq Stockholm with billions of euros in annual revenue and a portfolio built through one of the most aggressive acquisition campaigns in the industry’s history. This is the story of how it got there — the studio model it pioneered, the shift from ordinary tables to game-show formats, the companies it bought along the way, and the two documented episodes of regulatory scrutiny it has faced as a listed operator of licensed gambling infrastructure.

For background on how licensing works for the operators that use Evolution’s content, see our guide to checking a casino’s licence and our Malta Gaming Authority licence explainer. For the equivalent company histories of two other major suppliers, see our pieces on Microgaming and Games Global and on Spribe, the studio behind Aviator. This article is a company history, not a review — it does not recommend any operator, product, or way to play.

From a rented studio in Riga to a live-casino category

Evolution Gaming was founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Jens von Bahr and Fredrik Österberg, joined by Richard Hadida, with the stated aim of professionalising live-dealer casino gaming — at the time a niche, technically clunky corner of online gambling built on inconsistent video feeds and small-scale operations. The founders’ pitch to operators was a broadcast-quality alternative: a purpose-built studio, trained dealers, and a streaming pipeline reliable enough to run as a genuine business-to-business utility rather than a single operator’s in-house novelty.

The company’s first live-roulette stream ran from a rented studio in Riga, Latvia — a choice driven by cost and access to a large pool of multilingual dealer talent rather than any Latvian gambling-market ambition. By 2013 Evolution had grown that single studio into what it described as the largest single-site live casino operation in Europe, running its 100th live table from the Riga site. Von Bahr served as chief executive until 2016, when he moved to the chairman’s role; Martin Carlesund has led the company as CEO since 2017.

Evolution listed on Nasdaq First North Premier in Stockholm on 20 March 2015, and later moved up to the main Nasdaq Nordic list. Studios followed in Spain, Malta, Belgium, the United States (New Jersey, then Pennsylvania, Michigan, Connecticut and a second New Jersey site), Lithuania and elsewhere as it chased the regulated markets opening up around it — most notably the wave of individual US states legalising online casino play through the late 2010s and 2020s, and Ontario’s regulated market from 2022.

The studio model: what Evolution actually built

The core of Evolution’s business is not any single game but a repeatable operating model: dedicated studios built to broadcast standards, professional dealers trained and rostered like television presenters, proprietary camera and streaming technology, and a back-end that lets an operator plug a live table into its own website as if it were software rather than a video call to a casino floor. That model is what let Evolution sell the same underlying infrastructure — a studio, a dealer, a stream — to hundreds of separate licensed operators simultaneously, rather than each operator needing to build or license its own physical casino floor.

The commercial logic follows directly from that: more studios in more jurisdictions means more regulated markets Evolution can serve locally (a requirement in many licensed markets, where live content must originate from an approved jurisdiction), and a larger footprint of tables means better economics per dealer and per camera rig. This is the infrastructure that the game-show format, described below, was built on top of.

From tables to game shows

Evolution’s standard tables — blackjack, roulette, baccarat, poker variants — replicate a physical casino experience online. Its bigger commercial and cultural impact came from a different move: taking the live-studio format and using it to build entirely new game types that only make sense as a hybrid of a television game show and a casino odds table. Dream Catcher, launched in 2017, is generally credited as the first of these — a giant spinning wheel presented by a live host, with straightforward wheel-of-fortune odds rather than card or dice mechanics. It set the template Evolution then iterated on for most of the following decade.

Game Launch year What was mechanically new
Dream Catcher 2017 Established the “game show” category itself: a live host and a large physical wheel, replacing card/dice mechanics with straightforward wheel-segment odds, presented with television-style production values rather than a standard casino-table format.
Lightning Roulette 2018 Combined a live roulette wheel with an RNG-generated layer: before each spin, the system randomly assigns cash multipliers to a handful of numbers, so a live physical outcome and a separate randomly generated payout boost run side by side. It became the template for Evolution’s later “Lightning”-branded variants across other table games.
Monopoly Live 2019 Evolution’s first mainstream branded/licensed game show, built around the Monopoly board-game IP with a bonus round in which a physical board and augmented-reality graphics are layered together in the live stream — an early large-scale use of AR inside a live-dealer broadcast.
Crazy Time July 2020 Expanded the wheel format into four distinct bonus games attached to individual wheel segments, each with its own separate live-hosted mini-round. It is widely reported as Evolution’s most-played game show and is frequently cited by industry commentators as emblematic of the category’s growth.

This is not an exhaustive list — Evolution has continued releasing further game shows (Deal or No Deal, Mega Ball, XXXtreme Lightning Roulette, Funky Time and others) at a steady pace — but these four are the ones most consistently credited with defining the category’s mechanics and driving its adoption. The specific mechanical descriptions above reflect widely reported general knowledge of how these games work rather than a single cited technical source; readers wanting the exact current rules of any given game should consult the operator or Evolution’s own game descriptions rather than this history.

The acquisition spree

Evolution’s other defining strategy has been buying, rather than building, its way into adjacent categories — principally RNG-based slots, a category live-dealer streaming does not itself cover. The pattern is consistent: acquire a company with a strong existing content library and distribution, then push its games through Evolution’s own commercial relationships with operators.

  • Ezugi (2018). Evolution agreed to acquire live-casino rival Ezugi on 21 November 2018 for up to $18 million (an initial $12 million plus up to $6 million in further consideration), completing the deal on 9 January 2019. Ezugi gave Evolution a stronger footprint in Latin America and parts of Asia, and — notably — extra reach into US states as they began regulating online casino play.
  • NetEnt, and Red Tiger by extension (2020). Evolution announced a recommended all-share public offer for Swedish slots developer NetEnt on 24 June 2020, valuing NetEnt at approximately SEK 19.6 billion (reported at the time as roughly $2.1 billion) at an exchange ratio of 0.1306 Evolution shares per NetEnt share. The offer was declared unconditional on 23 November 2020 after acceptance from holders of 97.3% of NetEnt’s votes. This deal brought Red Tiger Gaming into Evolution’s portfolio at one remove: NetEnt had itself acquired Red Tiger in an all-cash deal reported at roughly £220 million (about $272 million) in September 2019, before Evolution’s own acquisition of NetEnt closed.
  • Big Time Gaming (2021). Evolution agreed on 12 April 2021 to acquire Australian slot developer Big Time Gaming — known for inventing the “Megaways” mechanic licensed across the wider industry — for up to approximately €460 million: €220 million upfront (split between cash and Evolution shares) plus earn-out payments of up to €230 million tied to Big Time Gaming’s 2022–24 EBITDA. The acquisition completed on 30 June 2021.
  • Nolimit City (2022). Evolution announced an agreement to acquire Swedish-founded slot studio Nolimit City on 22 June 2022 for up to €340 million (€200 million upfront in cash, plus earn-outs of up to €140 million), completing the purchase on 8 August 2022.

The precise deal mechanics above (cash/share splits, exact earn-out conditions) are drawn from Evolution’s own press releases and are the most reliable figures in this article; where a value is instead reported only in trade press as a rounded conversion (for instance the “$2.1 billion” figure commonly used for the NetEnt deal, a conversion of the SEK figure at the time), that is flagged in this article’s sources note.

A listed company at global scale

Evolution trades on Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker EVO and sits in both the OMX Stockholm 30 and OMX Nordic 40 indices — meaning its results are public, audited, and scrutinised by analysts in the way any large listed company’s are, a different level of disclosure from most of the online casino industry it supplies. By its 2023 full-year results, Evolution reported revenue of roughly €1.8 billion and a workforce north of 19,000 people (the great majority of them studio and production staff across its network of live studios), figures that reflect both organic growth in live and game-show content and the scale added by the NetEnt/Red Tiger, Big Time Gaming and Nolimit City acquisitions. Evolution’s own investor-relations site publishes its full annual and quarterly reports, which is the authoritative source for current financial detail rather than any figure repeated here.

Regulatory scrutiny: the 2021 short-seller report and the New Jersey investigation

Evolution’s most widely reported regulatory episode began in November 2021, when an anonymous report — publicly fronted by the US law firm Calcagni & Kanefsky rather than by a named author — alleged that Evolution’s live-casino content was being offered in jurisdictions where online gambling was banned or under international sanctions, reportedly naming Iran, Syria and, in some accounts, Sudan or Hong Kong depending on the source. The report caused a sharp fall in Evolution’s share price — reported variously as wiping several billion euros, or in some later press accounts a much larger sum, off its market capitalisation within weeks — and Evolution publicly rejected the allegations, describing the report as manufactured by a rival with an interest in damaging the company.

It is important to separate the allegation from the outcome. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE), which received the report, opened a formal investigation into whether Evolution had “sanctioned, promoted, permitted, or otherwise materially benefitted from” its content being offered in prohibited jurisdictions. That investigation ran from November 2021 until it was formally closed on 20 February 2024. The DGE’s own announcement stated that it found no evidence Evolution had engaged in the conduct alleged, that its existing compliance processes were adequate, and that Evolution had nonetheless voluntarily strengthened its procedures during the review — changes the DGE said it endorsed. In the regulator’s own words, the matter was “closed requiring no further action.”

Separately from the regulatory investigation, a legal dispute has continued over who was actually behind the 2021 report. Evolution pursued — and, per multiple 2024–2025 trade press reports, eventually won — a New Jersey court battle to compel disclosure of the party behind the report, with reporting naming the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube as the entity that compiled it on behalf of an as-yet-undisclosed client; some reporting has suggested a competitor may have commissioned it, though this has not been confirmed by any party and should be read as unconfirmed. No public finding has established who commissioned the report or why, and this article does not allege that any named party engaged in wrongdoing in commissioning or compiling it — only that a formal disclosure dispute over its authorship has been reported and, per available reporting, resolved substantially in Evolution’s favour.

A separate, more recent regulatory episode: the UK settlement

A second, distinct and more recent regulatory matter is documented directly on the UK Gambling Commission’s own register rather than via press reports of an anonymous allegation. On 23 July 2026, the Commission announced that Evolution Malta Holding Limited — the Evolution group entity holding UK remote gambling software and game-host licences — would pay £4.75 million following an investigation covering the period December 2023 to November 2024. The Commission’s investigation found that Evolution’s money-laundering risk assessment was outdated and had not identified that two third-party operators were supplying Evolution’s games to six unlicensed websites accessible to consumers in Great Britain, and that this amounted to breaches of licence conditions covering anti-money-laundering risk assessment, policy and controls, and customer due diligence. The Commission’s director of enforcement, John Pierce, was quoted describing the risk assessment as having “failed to adequately consider the risk of its games being made available through unlicensed operators.”

The Commission’s own account states plainly that it considered these failings serious enough to have contemplated suspending Evolution’s UK licence, but that it did not do so: Evolution’s licence was not suspended, the company implemented strengthened controls during the investigation, and subsequent testing found no further concerns. The settlement is a finding of licence-condition breaches relating to AML process failures — not a finding of money laundering having actually occurred, and not a criminal matter. It should be read as exactly what the regulator’s own release describes: a regulatory settlement for compliance failings, resolved by payment and corrective action, with the licence remaining in force throughout.

Where that leaves the record

Taken together, the two episodes above are the only regulatory matters concerning Evolution that this article was able to verify against primary or clearly attributed sources: a 2021–2024 New Jersey investigation into illegal-market allegations that closed with no adverse finding against Evolution, and a 2026 UK Gambling Commission settlement over AML process failings that did result in a financial penalty but not a licence suspension. Both are described here with their outcomes stated explicitly, because an allegation — however widely reported — is not the same thing as a regulatory finding, and conflating the two would misrepresent both the New Jersey and the UK record.

Sources

Looking for where to play?

See our independently rated, licence-checked top casinos before you deposit.

Top casinos

18+ · Play responsibly · T&Cs apply · Gambling can be addictive. Responsible play resources