Alexandre Tomic: “Looking back, it was like being reborn. Painful but necessary”

You have built Alea from the ground up. What was the greatest challenge you faced on this journey? How did you approach it?

My biggest challenge was changing partners while completely rebuilding Alea’s identity.

I had a business partner for 15 years. We built SlotsMillion together from 2012, and we were operators dealing with everything that comes with running an online casino.

But after 15 years, we looked at each other and we both knew: we were done. Entrepreneurship is challenging; we were very different people, we’d changed over the years, and like any human relationship, it came to its natural end. We were no longer a fit. So we decided to split operations.

It felt very much like starting over. The business itself was solid and performing well; that was never the issue. The challenge was more personal: suddenly, I was emotionally on my own. In the past, if I had a difficult day, there was someone beside me who could carry part of that weight until I found my footing again. Now, there was no one else at that level. Of course, I had my managers and my team, but the ultimate responsibility, the one that comes when you know there’s nothing but a wall behind your back, that’s a very lonely place to be without a partner.

And that’s when Charlotte Lecomte comes into the story. She was the CPO at the time, but we co-founded the real Alea together, the B2B aggregation company. Without Charlotte, there’s no Alea as it exists today. She understood the vision immediately.

We went from building for ourselves to building for dozens of operators across different markets. Suddenly, you’re not just responsible for your own platform; you’re responsible for other people’s entire gaming operations. If our servers go down, their entire casino goes down. If we have a security breach, their players get hacked.

We had to rebuild everything. Not just the technical architecture, but the entire mindset. We went from “how do we make our casino work?” to “how do we make sure 200+ software providers can’t accidentally or intentionally hurt our operator customers?”

The human cost was enormous too. We had to restructure teams, let some people go, bring new people in. Some of our best developers hated working on APIs, and that’s when I realized we needed specialists, not generalists trying to do everything.

Looking back, it was like being reborn. Painful but necessary. And now we’re probably the biggest aggregator in LATAM and Brazil. It worked out.

You’ve repeatedly underlined that integrating faulty API addresses from unproven providers is a massive risk. Were you ever present to personally witness the consequences of such oversights, or is it purely preventive measures?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen this firsthand, and it’s devastating.

I can’t name companies, but I’ve known operators losing $2 million per week for one and a half years. Total damage? Around $120-150 million when finally discovered. And that’s just one case. Not a client, but it opened my eyes to what we had to do.

Here’s how it works: A new software provider comes with beautiful games, great mechanics. But their API has no authentication, no rollbacks. Some have even told us outright that they don’t see the need for authentication. But we are talking about real-money transactions. If your bank requires authentication, so should a gaming provider.

Hackers identify these vulnerabilities on other platforms first, test them quietly, and then exploit them once an operator integrates the games. They create wins without bets or manipulate transaction IDs. It’s a form of silent bleeding: the fraud team doesn’t catch it because these fabricated wins are hidden among legitimate ones from other providers.

I recall being at the iGaming NEXT Summit when a software provider asked me not to discuss hacks during our panel. Later, I found out they had been attacked just two days before. That same evening, another provider’s representative thanked me for not mentioning their company; I didn’t even know they’d been hacked too.

This happens weekly. Most of the time, it’s never discovered. Operators just accept lower margins, thinking it’s competition when they’re being systematically robbed.

That’s why at Alea, we force reverse integration. It’s a preventative measure. Providers integrate our API, follow our governance. Sometimes they rebuild their entire system just to work with us. This is the cost of protecting operators from financial self-destruction.

What has inspired you to start a podcast?

I’ve been having these incredible conversations for years. But they’re always off-the-record, behind closed doors.

You find yourself at a conference, sitting in a bar at 2 AM with a founder who just raised €50 million, and suddenly they’re telling you about the time they almost went bankrupt, or how they had to fire their best friend, or how they were taking antidepressants just to get through board meetings. These are the incredible stories that matter. Because life, and business, are messy.

The hyperbaric chamber element came later, but once we started, it felt natural. It creates a unique environment: no phones, no distractions, just pure pressure and oxygen, sharpening the mind. A perfect setting. After all, diamonds are formed under pressure, and so are great companies, great people, great ideas.

What I am really seeking is honesty. I’m tired of the polished narratives of companies “crushing it” or founders claiming everything is flawless. I want to hear about the moments when someone nearly walked away, when a partnership almost destroyed the business, when panic attacks made them question whether they could go on. And then I want to hear how those same experiences became the foundation of their greatest achievements.

Those moments shape us way more than the victories, and that’s what people actually connect with. The messy, unfiltered, real parts of building something meaningful.

Is there any part of Alea you would want to change or improve?

Alea is built on the idea that we never stop evolving. And the biggest change I want to make is how we use intelligence, both human and artificial.

In the last five years as a B2B company, we’ve grown from 12 employees to over 80, from 2,000 games to 16,000+, and from 10 providers to over 160. We launched Alea Pay, our payment gateway solutions, and became the leading aggregator in Sweepstakes Casinos. But here’s what I really want to improve: our ability to predict instead of just react.

Today, we handle vast amounts of data: hundreds of casinos, thousands of games, millions of transactions. But sometimes, we still tend to recognize success only after it happens. For example, I did not predict the extraordinary success of the Fortune Tiger slot in Brazil, and as someone who considers himself a game expert, that is something I want to change.

This is why I have been working extensively with AI; true agentic AI, not the machine learning that was being labeled as “AI” only a few years ago. I want to integrate this technology more deeply into Alea, not just for data analysis, but to anticipate trends, to understand player psychology before patterns emerge. AI can process aggregation data at a scale and speed that would take human analysts months.

Of course, there is a challenge here, and it ties directly to our role as industry gatekeepers: AI can be powerful, but it can also generate unreliable insights. So we need to be careful. When we’re protecting our clients’ businesses, we can’t rely on AI making decisions about which providers to integrate or which markets are safe.

The future I envision for Alea is one where human intelligence and artificial intelligence work together. Not only to aggregate games, but to predict the future of gaming itself.

Your page says, “Our goal is to create an innovative and fun experience for your players.” What’s the key to delivering on that promise?

The key lies in perspective: we have been on both sides of the business, and that shapes everything we do.

Even today, I remain an operator but with different partners. I know what it feels like when your payment gateway crashes and you have angry players flooding your support channels. I know the stress of integrating a new software provider. I know the unpredictable and expensive nature of jackpots.

When you’ve lived that reality, you design differently. You don’t build features that look pretty in demos but break under real load. You build for the moment when everything goes wrong, because in this industry, everything always goes wrong at the worst possible time.

“Fun” for players is actually simple: if the games load fast, if the spins register correctly, if the money flows smoothly; that’s when players have fun. But all of that depends on rock-solid infrastructure that operators can’t see.

The unglamorous truth is that true innovation isn’t about flashy features; it’s about resilience. It’s ensuring that when a player wins a jackpot on Christmas Day, the result is recorded correctly, the payout processes instantly, and the fraud team doesn’t trigger a false alarm. That’s the foundation that lets creativity flourish.

If we do our job right, the operator never thinks about us. They’re focused on marketing, on player acquisition, on creating those experiences that make gambling feel magical. Meanwhile, we’re quietly making sure their entire gaming operation just works.

That’s how “fun” stops being a promise and becomes reality. The player doesn’t know about our API governance or our security protocols; they just know the games work perfectly every time they want to play.