Super Technologies to Buy Software Firm for Romania Hub

Super Technologies, the betting and gaming group formerly known as Superbet, has agreed to acquire Crafting Technologies, a software developer based in Cluj-Napoca, in a deal that buys the company an engineering team rather than betting customers. Announced on June 22, 2026, the transaction is subject to customary approvals, and neither side disclosed a price.

The purchase marks a shift in how the Blackstone-backed group is spending. Earlier in 2026 it agreed to buy Maxbet’s online business to add players and market share at home in Romania. Crafting brings something different: developers, a training pipeline and a base to expand the technology Super builds in-house instead of licensing from third parties.

A talent deal, not a sportsbook deal

Crafting — which operated earlier as Crafting Software — is a decade-old firm that builds high-throughput payment and data systems in the Elixir and Erlang programming languages for fintech and other clients. It is small: Romanian financial daily Ziarul Financiar reported revenue of about 23.6 million lei (roughly €4.7 million) in 2025 and fewer than two dozen staff, and said the founders had been open to a full exit since 2021.

What Super is really buying is access to engineers in one of Europe’s deeper, cheaper talent pools. The group plans to create an initial 50 roles in Cluj-Napoca and fold Crafting’s team into the business, anchoring a new technology hub in the northwestern city. That adds Romania to a development network spanning Croatia, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK and Brazil that already employs more than 900 engineers.

The deal also hands Super an in-house talent academy that trains and upskills developers — a pipeline rather than a one-off hire. For a company that now describes its core asset as a proprietary “playstack,” owning the people and the training behind that software in a lower-cost market is the strategic logic.

Owning the software outright matters for an operator. A proprietary platform lets Super tune odds, payments and personalisation without waiting on a vendor, push products into new markets faster, and keep the margin that would otherwise go to a licensor. The trade-off is cost: building and maintaining that stack means carrying a large engineering payroll, which is exactly why a deeper, lower-cost talent market is attractive.

“Romania’s mature and competitive technology ecosystem provides access to specialized engineering capabilities essential for Super’s future roadmap,” said Albert Simsensohn, the group’s deputy chief executive. Gabriel Bota, Crafting’s co-founder and chief executive, framed the sale as a natural step, citing a shared engineering culture with the buyer.

Blackstone’s money behind the buildout

Super has been acquisitive since securing a €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion) refinancing in 2025, underwritten by principal backer Blackstone alongside funds managed by HPS Investment Partners. Blackstone first took a minority stake of about €175 million in the then-Superbet in 2019, and the 2025 package was earmarked partly to deepen investment in proprietary technology.

That capital is bankrolling a wider repositioning. The company rebranded from Superbet Group to Super Technologies in December 2025, pitching itself as a technology platform rather than a pure betting operator, with founder Sacha Dragic consolidating control as chief executive. The roughly 5,000-person group, built over 17 years from a base in Romania and Serbia, has since agreed a deal with Sportradar covering its European and Brazilian operations and launched its Superbet brand in Greece.

The Crafting purchase fits the pattern of operators buying or building their own technology rather than renting it. It echoes the broader wave of 2026 gambling-sector M&A, from Genius Sports’s £882 million purchase of media group Legend to the move to bring the old 888 and William Hill businesses under Bally’s.

Building at home through an overhaul

The timing is notable because Romania is both Super’s home market and a jurisdiction in flux. The country has been overhauling its retail gambling rules and chasing an entrenched black market, and Super’s own executives have argued the unlicensed sector — not online-versus-retail competition — is the real threat. Investing in a Romanian engineering hub as that regulatory picture shifts signals where the group sees long-term value.

It is also Super’s second Romanian deal of the year, after the Maxbet acquisition cemented its lead in the Romanian betting market. The difference is that this one is about supply, not demand: the engineers who build the product, not the customers who use it.

For now, completion rests on the customary approvals, and the financial terms stay private. The questions to watch are whether Super keeps pairing operator deals with technology buys as it scales across Europe and Latin America, and how cleanly a 5,000-person group absorbs a boutique studio whose founders were already heading for the exit.