When a slot title is doing two or three times the house average on the casino floor, the next move is often to bring it online. The problem is that "online" has historically meant starting from scratch—a reauthorization process that can run six to eight months and costs roughly $500,000 per title, whether manufacturers handle it internally or hand it off to a porting shop.
That’s a bottleneck that clogs the whole supply chain. Manufacturers can't move fast enough, operators are starved for new content, and players burn through what's available in three to four weeks and want something new.
Hydrastack thinks the industry has been solving this the wrong way. "Manufacturers are treating this as a re-authoring exercise," CEO David Dimas said on The BettingStartups Podcast. The Chicago-based startup is building a proprietary platform that ingests the codebase of an existing class III land-based game and, using fine-tuned AI models, converts it into an online-ready version in six to eight weeks. Developers don't have to change how they build. Once a game is done, they click the Hydrastack button and the conversion begins.
Dimas spent a decade at WMS Gaming as a product manager before the company became Light & Wonder, watching this problem repeat itself without resolution. "Gaming is still struggling with this. I left five years ago. How is this not solved yet?" His co-founder and CTO Kavin Kaviarasan came at it from the other direction: a computer science background in DOD tech consulting and Fortune 500 digital transformation. The two met at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
The technical approach leans on what Kaviarasan describes as centralizing tribal knowledge—the undocumented, studio-specific logic that accumulates across years of game development. "By giving you the ability to now put that tribal knowledge in a singular location, [it] allows you to operate on a single platform,” he said. “So now your art people, your coding team, and your math can all communicate to each other a lot easier." The AI models are open-source forks kept siloed per manufacturer, so conversion insights from one studio don't bleed into another's—a data security concern Dimas said surfaced repeatedly across hundreds of customer discovery calls.
Those conversations also shaped the roadmap. European manufacturers told the team they want to run the conversion in reverse: online games ported to land-based formats. The platform is built to handle that, with development targeted for 2027. The business model is a platform license plus a per-conversion fee, priced as a fraction of what the current process costs.
On traction: Hydrastack won first place at the Zero Labs accelerator last fall, and is currently in the finals of Booth's New Venture Challenge. A pilot is underway with one of the “Big Three” manufacturers to convert two titles. Due diligence is active with three to four gaming-specific VCs, and the team is targeting a commercially ready platform by the end of this summer, with a full showing at G2E. After that, in Dimas's words:"Let us handle the unsexy parts."
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