Interim tag dropped after four months
Hacksaw AB (STO:HACK) has appointed Ana Vrabic Verdir as permanent Group CEO, effective immediately. The board announced the decision on August 20, 2026, just under four months after she stepped into the role on an interim basis.
Vrabic Verdir has sat on Hacksaw’s board since 2024. The Chairman of the Board led the recruitment process, which considered both external and internal candidates before the board settled on the interim CEO already running the company.
“Ana has been close to Hacksaw for several years and, as a Board member and Interim Group CEO, she has a strong understanding of both the business and the company’s development. Since April she has led the Group with clear direction, and the Board is unanimous that she is the right person to build on that work,” says Patrick Svensk, Chairman of the Board.
From M&A lawyer to the top job
Vrabic Verdir took the interim role on April 30, 2026, after the board removed her predecessor, Christoffer Källberg, a day after Hacksaw had reported first-quarter results. Svensk described the change at the time as the outcome of a careful and thorough board review, not a response to any specific incident, and credited Källberg’s tenure with Hacksaw’s Nasdaq Stockholm listing and steady financial performance. Källberg had led the company for just over a year.
By background, Vrabic Verdir is a corporate law and M&A specialist at Alto Law AB. She stepped down from the board’s remuneration committee for the duration of her interim tenure, a standard governance step when a sitting board member takes on an executive role.
“Hacksaw operates in a large and growing global market, and after these past months my view is that we have only begun to see what the platform can carry. I have seen at close range the drive and entrepreneurial spirit within this organisation, and that is where our strength lies. I look forward to continuing to deliver on our business strategy together with the team, and I thank the Board for its continued confidence,” says Ana Vrabic Verdir.
Board seat retained, structure unchanged
Vrabic Verdir keeps her board seat until Hacksaw’s next annual general meeting, sitting alongside her own executive role until shareholders decide otherwise. The company said the Group’s management structure is otherwise unchanged, with operational activities continuing to run from Malta and from Hacksaw’s individual markets.
The permanent appointment lands as the underlying business keeps growing. Hacksaw is a B2B supplier that distributes slots, scratch cards and instant-win games to operators through its OpenRGS platform, covering the value chain from game development to distribution. The company listed on Nasdaq Stockholm’s main market in June 2025 and reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of €57.6 million, up 28% year-on-year, with an adjusted operating margin of 82%, just days before the CEO change that first put Vrabic Verdir in charge. The platform has also kept adding partner studios this year, including Aloha Gaming, which signed on to distribute through OpenRGS.
That growth is now hers to manage without the interim qualifier attached to her title. No new strategy accompanied the appointment; the company described the decision as building on four months of work already under way. Investors get a settled leadership picture heading into the second half of the year, after two CEO announcements inside five months.
The test comes next, as Vrabic Verdir moves from managing Hacksaw through a leadership gap to setting the multi-year direction the market will hold her to, including how far OpenRGS can extend Hacksaw’s reach among operators beyond its current partner base. The next annual general meeting will also settle a smaller open question: whether she keeps both her board seat and the CEO’s chair, or hands the board role to someone else now that a permanent chief executive is in place.
Source: Hacksaw AB
