Malta’s AI slot-review engine writes 500 daily guides without breaking a single rule

# Inside the compliance-first AI engine publishing 500 slot comparisons a day

**How a Sliema start-up quietly became the iGaming world’s fastest reviewer—while staying on the right side of Malta’s watchdog**

By 9 a.m. the cappuccinos are already cooling on the balconies of Tower Road, but inside a converted sea-front townhouse a cluster of GPUs is running hotter than August asphalt. Every 24 hours the machines spit out 500 brand-new slot reviews—each one written, fact-checked and compliance-scrubbed by an AI engine built by three Maltese founders who met at University’s KSU hackathon five years ago.

Welcome to SlotSift Ltd., the island’s least visible unicorn-in-the-making. From the outside it looks like another glass-door office with a vintage Pac-Man machine in the corner. Inside, proprietary large-language models cross-reference 114 regulatory databases—from the MGA’s white-list to the Swedish Spelinspektionen’s grey-list—before a single syllable goes live. The result? Affiliate sites from Oslo to Ontario can publish Malta-level compliance at the click of a button, and players get 500 daily comparisons that are 100 % RTP-accurate, 0 % misleading.

## Why Malta?

“Because the rulebook is written here,” laughs co-founder Kim Dalli, a 29-year-old lawyer-turned-developer whose dad dealt blackjack on the Dragonara boats in the ‘80s. “We’re not in Silicon Valley guessing what ‘responsible gambling’ means. We walk to the MGA offices in 15 minutes and ask.”

That proximity pays off. Since 2021 the Malta Gaming Authority has issued €68 million in fines for misleading affiliate content. SlotSift’s clients—40 operators and 230 affiliate portals—haven’t contributed a single cent. The start-up’s API blocks any phrase that could be construed as “targeting minors” or “guaranteed wins” before it reaches the CMS. In 2023 the company closed a €11 million Series A round led by local VC fund 256Degrees, valuing it at €90 million and turning heads from Castille to Brussels.

## Cultural footprint

But the story isn’t just about tech bros counting tokens. SlotSift trains its models on Maltese-English corpora scraped from Facebook village groups, Lovin Malta comments and *Times of Malta* archives, giving the reviews a linguistic twang that no Silicon Valley dataset can replicate. A phrase like “this slot is tighter than the parking in Strait Street” passes the compliance filter because the AI knows it’s cultural hyperbole, not a literal promise.

The company also sponsors Sliema Wanderers’ women’s futsal team—its logo appears on the sleeves—and last month funded a summer STEM course for 60 girls in Valletta. “We want the next generation to see iGaming as engineering, not just spinning reels,” says CTO Andre’ Micallef, whose grandmother baked *qagħaq tal-għasel* for the 1995 casino-opening protests. “Tech built responsibly can carry our culture forward, not trample it.”

## Community impact—good and bad

Yet not everyone is clapping. Local problem-gambling NGO ReStart has seen a 22 % spike in calls since AI-reviewed sites proliferated, arguing that hyper-accurate comparisons still normalise constant play. “It’s like putting calorie labels on cigarettes,” says ReStart director Fr. Joe Borg. “Better transparency doesn’t remove the risk.”

Dalli counters that SlotSift’s engine auto-inserts 30-second “cool-off” pop-ups and links to the MGA’s self-exclusion portal in every review. “We’re the only affiliate-tech firm with a full-time responsible-gambling psychologist,” she notes, pointing to Dr. Clarice Fenech, formerly of Sedqa, who vets training data for addictive triggers.

## Jobs, not just jackpots

Economically, the ripple effect is tangible. The company employs 54 people—35 in Malta—from NLP linguists to UX designers, and outsources translation to 120 freelancers across Gozo, giving rural bilingual graduates a reason to stay. Average salary: €42 k, 28 % above the national private-sector mean. Next year SlotSift will move into the former HSBC building in Birkirkara, pledging 120 additional hires.

## Regulatory tightrope

With the EU’s AI Act entering force, Malta faces pressure to extend its sandbox regime beyond blockchain to artificial intelligence. MGA CEO Carl Brincat hints at a “compliance-as-a-service” licence category, potentially inspired by the SlotSift model. “If we get this right,” Brincat told *SiGMA TV*, “Malta becomes the Delaware of ethical AI.”

For now, the GPUs keep humming, the Pac-Man machine keeps flashing, and 500 new reviews roll out daily—each one stamped with a Maltese cross of regulatory approval. In an industry often accused of moving fast and breaking things, a tiny island is proving that speed and safety can share the same townhouse. The jackpot? A reputation no fine can take away.