A Quiet Powerhouse Behind iGaming And Education

Every tech decade has a few names that quietly shape the direction of an entire niche. In online entertainment and gaming infrastructure, one of those names is Uri Poliavich.

His work lives in the background of familiar casino brands and platforms, yet the ideas he pushes forward are changing how players engage with games and how companies think about growth, purpose, and responsibility.

Articles featuring Uri Poliavich describe a founder who treats business as an engine for longer projects: building products that scale, funding new startups, and supporting education for thousands of children around the world.

Behind the usual buzzwords about “innovation” sits a story of someone who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, moved to Israel as a teenager, studied law, and then chose gaming tech as the arena where vision and discipline could work together.

From Soviet childhood to global platforms

In 1981 he was born in Ukraine, and in 1985 his family moved to Israel. As a child he remembers being very hungry, and because he was not getting enough support he wanted to change this.

After he moved to Israel, he went to school and then did a three year military service. He learned how to plan, concentrate, and to take small steps, instead of making a lot of noise and big promises.

Instead of jumping directly into startups, he chose law. He studied at Bar-Ilan University and worked on commercial and real-estate deals, contracts, and cross-border transactions.

Those years in law firms and business development roles exposed him to the machinery behind companies: how risk is priced, how deals are structured, and how long-term partnerships are built.

Only after that came the shift into iGaming. Poliavich worked with major providers and operators, learning the ecosystem from the inside.

He saw where legacy platforms slowed operators down, where user experience looked stuck in a previous decade, and where data and gamification could push engagement to a different level.

Soft2Bet as a laboratory for new ideas

In 2016, he founded Soft2Bet, which grew from a focused startup into a global iGaming technology group with a multi-brand strategy and operations under numerous licenses across several jurisdictions. Soft2Bet builds platforms for online casinos and sportsbooks, yet the ambition goes deeper than that.

Under Poliavich’s leadership, the company treats the platform as a living laboratory. One of the key results is MEGA, the Motivational Engineering Gaming Application, a gamification engine designed to layer missions, progress, and rewards over the usual casino experience.

The idea is simple: people respond strongly to goals, feedback, and narrative. MEGA attempts to turn that into a structured, measurable system that gives operators higher engagement and gives players a more coherent journey.

Several traits define this phase of his career:

• Long view on regulation and licensing across multiple markets

• Obsession with engagement mechanics and player journeys

• Constant search for talent and teams with unusual perspectives

• Willingness to reinvest profits into new products and funds

Soft2Bet’s growth, new offices in places like Malta, and expansion into markets such as Ontario show how that approach translates into scale when combined with strong operational discipline.

Gamification as a language, not just a feature

The word “gamification” gets thrown around easily, often reduced to badges and streaks. Poliavich treats it as a full language for designing behavior. MEGA is built around a simple idea: every action can sit inside a story. When the story is clear, users feel progress and stay engaged longer.

Industry interviews show him repeating a few core principles of this approach:

• Engagement grows when users feel agency and choice.

• Systems work better when they teach as they reward.

• Metrics matter only when they connect directly to user value.

In other words, the engine under the hood matters as much as the shiny front-end of any casino brand. That mindset explains why Poliavich is frequently invited to speak about gamification not only in gaming, but also in fintech and digital products more broadly.

Business, hunger and the Yael Foundation

The story would be incomplete without the philanthropic layer. Poliavich wants more Jewish education to be offered all over the world, and he also does well in the video game business. He created a charity walked the Yael Foundation, alongside his wife.

The charity focuses on helping educational endeavors about the Jewish people, and has assisted over 12,500 people in 37 countries who have been primary school-aged. The work has been helping through summer camps, educational units, and identity programs and community programs.

The foundation invests in:

• Day schools and after-school programs that help children connect with their heritage

• Camps that bring together teenagers from different European communities

• Security and support for schools that face rising antisemitism

A line he repeats in interviews sums up this connection between profit and purpose: charity drives his business thinking, because the desire to expand educational opportunities pushes him to build stronger companies and new funding tools.

This approach also shows up in Soft2Bet Invest, a fund launched to back emerging ventures in gaming and casual entertainment.

The fund invests in projects that mix technology, user experience, and long-term value creation, offering more than just capital. It treats founders as partners in a shared experiment about where interactive entertainment can go next.

Why his path speaks to the next wave of founders?

For many younger founders, the journey of Uri Poliavich feels different from the usual startup tale. There is no overnight explosion, no single viral moment that “made” everything. Instead, there is an arc: law studies, corporate roles, careful observation of an industry, a platform built step by step, and then a philanthropic network that extends far beyond gaming.

Several lessons stand out from his story:

• Deep domain knowledge gives more room for original ideas

• Regulation-heavy industries reward patience and clean structure

• Gamification turns into a powerful engine when treated as strategy, not decoration

• Personal history and values can shape investment and philanthropy in concrete ways

Recognition from industry awards, lists of influential leaders, and major Jewish publications shows how that combination of tech and education resonates in very different circles.

In the end, the picture that emerges is of a founder who thinks in systems. One system powers casino brands and sportsbooks. Another system supports schools, camps, and teachers.

A third system backs new founders through investment. The main idea behind all of them is to design systems that give people more power, more tools, and more chances to modify their own path.

For people who are interested in the iGaming industry or purpose-driven digital enterprises, Uri Poliavich’s tale is a great example of how the same thing may lead to both business success and educational effect, as long as the desire to build never goes away.