The iGaming industry has always been a fast-moving and fragmented marketplace, which makes it particularly difficult to see where demand really flows, suggests Max Tesla (pictured). The chief executive and co-founder of Blask says the sector has long suffered from a critical “blind spot”, namely a lack of timely and trustworthy intelligence.
Founded in 2021, Blask is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven market analytics platform, created on a simple premise: ‘Can you build a trustworthy competitive picture from open data alone?’.
Most existing market data in the iGaming sector “is either locked inside companies, arrives too late via quarterly reports, or breaks apart when you look at offshore and semi-regulated markets where brands constantly change domains, create mirrors, and multiply aliases,” Mr Tesla told GGRasia in an interview.
“We started Blask in 2021 because we saw that if you try to understand the market by domains, reality fragments into thousands of pieces and any conclusion becomes unreliable,” he explained. “So, from day one we chose a brand-level approach: the brand is the entity, and domains and mirrors are noise to be filtered.”
Mr Tesla and Dmitry Belianin, another co-founder – along with Slava Lumelsky, chief technology officer, and Nick Fadeev, head of design – had the core idea of building a system that collected openly-available data with “traces of market demand and behaviour”.
Such data are then turned into metrics that companies can use for a variety of purposes, such as “market entry, share defence, partner selection, and content prioritisation,” Mr Tesla noted.
That foundation has evolved into what Mr Tesla calls a “Bloomberg-style console for iGaming”, delivering daily and even hourly brand-level data across more than 100 markets. The platform measures market volume – referred to as ‘Blask Index’; brand power – labelled ‘BAP’; acquisition potential – known as ‘APS’; revenue baselines – tagged ‘CEB’; and game distribution, he added.
From concept to global acceleration
The entrepreneur said Blask’s growth has unfolded in three distinct phases. The first, between 2021 and 2023, focused on proving that open data could reliably reflect market dynamics. That also included angel funding in early 2022 and a pre-seed round of support the following year, which allowed the team to build its initial pipeline of AI technology and a testing framework.
The second phase, from 2023 to 2024, was about working to transform Blask’s research into a usable product. “We signed our first client in the summer of 2023, had our public launch in 2024, and received immediate validation from the industry, winning the SiGMA Asia 2024 Startup Pitch Award,” Mr Tesla noted.
Blask’s third phase, now under way, deepens its capabilities with what the company says is its “game layer”. Using “computer vision” technology, Blask “scans thousands of online casino lobbies daily, recognising thousands of individual games and measuring their visibility and positioning,” the CEO said.
Computer vision is a sub-field of AI that equips machines with the ability to process, analyse and interpret visual inputs, aiming to derive meaningful information from such data.
This approach, the executive added, “allows operators and studios to monitor game placement and competitive exposure in near real time”.
Mr Tesla said 2025 was a “breakout year” for the firm’s geographic coverage, and the services it provides. At the beginning of 2025, the company tracked around 50 markets; by December, its coverage had nearly doubled.
The first quarter of last year saw the addition of Greece, Armenia, Slovenia and Belgium to its coverage, markets in Europe that have “distinct regulatory and competitive frameworks”.
By mid-2025, Blask launched the beta version of its “Games” module, introducing cross-country tracking of game visibility and player preferences. “We also launched ‘Global Brands’ view, letting users track any brand’s performance across all countries of presence on a single page,” the entrepreneur added.
In September, the company added Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore to its coverage, described as three “crucial markets” for its data-analysis services in Southeast Asia. That was followed by a wave of service integrations across Eastern Europe, the Middle East’s Gulf region, and Africa.
Scaling coverage
Mr Tesla attributed the growth primarily to client demand, saying that after the platform’s public launch, the company saw a surge in interest from operators, providers, and investors “looking for coverage beyond Europe and Latin America”.
“Our automated discovery pipeline – combining Google scans, AI computer vision, text classification and human review – made it possible to scale coverage quickly without proportional cost increases,” he explained.
Support from Yolo Investments and Oakvale Capital LLP gave Blask the financial backing to accelerate its expansion, with the company now covering “more than 100 iGaming markets, spanning Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific,” the CEO stated.
Blask’s client portfolio includes operators such as “Stake, Bragg Gaming, Sportingtech, and Already Media,” along with affiliates, marketing agencies, platforms, and investors, Mr Tesla observed.
“We serve dozens of paying clients across these segments, with the mix shifting toward enterprise accounts as the product matures,” he added.
The growing client base reflects how the industry’s stakeholders are shifting from intuition to intelligence, with a key differentiator being speed, Mr Tesla said. “Operators want to know the signals before the competitive landscape changes, not after. The leading indicator matters more than the lagging report,” the CEO told GGRAsia.
He added: “Our goal is to cover additional markets, with more depth and more data accuracy and clarity.”
According to Mr Tesla, Blask’s clients use its data for strategic functions: identifying emerging markets before they become saturated; measuring acquisition efficiency; optimising content portfolios; and verifying whether marketing campaigns have produced genuine demand.
The Philippines, for example, “showed 12 straight months of market growth, up 47.6 percent year-on-year in terms of the Blask Index, allowing operators that spotted that signal early to capture a significant first-mover advantage,” the entrepreneur said.
Aside from a multi-layered AI pipeline – including provision of real-time data and application of computer vision for game distribution – Blask also links online-search interest with brand performance. This is in a bid to convert “demand signals” into predictive intelligence.
“Search interest is a leading indicator of market share. We adapted it for iGaming with sentiment filtering, brand entity resolution across mirrors, and normalisation,” the CEO explained. Mr Tesla added, citing the company’s data, that changes in “share of search” typically “precede financial outcomes by 30 to 90 days”.
Opportunity, challenges in Asia
For Blask, Asia has become one of the most “strategically important” and fastest-growing regions, being “one of the most underserved” by existing intelligence providers. The company’s entry into Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore in late 2025 extended an already broad footprint that included Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and several Gulf states.
Southeast Asian markets rival major European ones in both size and potential, show data from Blask. Vietnam leads with a Blask Index above 60 million and more than 200 tracked brands; followed by the Philippines with an index of 53.8 million and nearly 190 brands “competing in a regulated environment”. Indonesia ranks fifth globally by revenue potential, while Thailand stands seventh, both being places with highly-competitive brand structures.
Among the standout markets, noted Mr Tesla, the Philippines has remained “always green” on Blask’s trend index. Indonesia shows fragmented but vibrant competition, while Vietnam’s vast unregulated market continues to attract new entrants.
In the Gulf region, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are “emerging as premium markets,” he added.
Asia’s regulatory patchwork is however among the most complex to operate in, the entrepreneur observed. For that reason, Blask has designed its data models to adapt to different jurisdictions and regulatory approaches.
In regulated markets such as the Philippines or Singapore, the executive said Blask anchors its revenue baseline to verified gross gaming revenue (GGR) data from regulators, parses multilingual filings, and integrates tax data to produce “calibrated, comparable metrics”.
In those markets, locally-licensed brands are distinguished from international operators. While the former are calibrated against regulatory data, by contrast the international brands are modelled “through behavioural signals plus ARPU [average revenue per user] benchmarks,” he added.
In unregulated or grey markets “such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam or Saudi Arabia,” all brands are “treated as international operators by default,” Mr Tesla noted.
For those unregulated jurisdictions, market size is estimated through demand volume, using the Blask Index, “combined with ARPU benchmarks from comparable economies,” the CEO explained. These metrics are then adjusted for regional realities, like payment systems and mobile penetration, he added.
“This dual-track approach is especially critical in Asia, where you have everything, from Singapore’s tightly regulated near-monopoly … to Vietnam’s 200-plus brands free-for-all,” Mr Tesla said in the interview with GGRAsia.
The Blask CEO sees Southeast Asia as the “next frontier” for iGaming growth. “Markets such as Vietnam and the Philippines already rival major European markets in demand volume, and Indonesia ranks fifth globally by revenue potential,” he noted.
With a regulated online market, the Philippines “demonstrates that regulation and growth can co-exist in Asia,” Mr Tesla said. “If other Asian markets follow a similar path, the addressable opportunity expands massively.”
Rising mobile adoption, crypto-friendly payment infrastructure and e-Sports integration, are also creating opportunities to “capture a younger demographic,” he suggested.
The main risks, he added, lie in regulatory fragmentation, market concentration, and the growing sophistication of cross-border enforcement, which may lead operators to “either be licensed or exit” a specific market.
“In Asia, the operators who win, will be the ones with the best intelligence,” Mr Tesla stated.
“We’re continuing to expand Asian coverage, deepening Games-module data for the region, and providing early signals that let operators decide before the landscape shifts,” he concluded.
