Alan’s meteoric rise in the French tech ecosystem it was both figurative and literal. A few years ago, the startup’s office was confined to one floor in a shabby office building near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris.
Over time, the company added another floor, then another – now the 550-employee company also occupies the top floor of the building. It is a communal space with a kitchen in one corner and a beautiful view of the typical gray zinc roofs of Paris.
This morning Alan co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and its chief revenue officer Ludovic Bauplé held a press conference with a group of journalists. Some of them cover tech startups, while others focus on the insurance industry. It’s an unusual combination of reporters, but that’s because Alan is an unusual company.
The company originally started with a health insurance product that complements the national healthcare system in France. French companies must provide a health insurance product to all their employees when they join. Today, over 500,000 people are covered by Alan’s insurance product.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
But Alan is also a tech company that has raised several rounds of funding. With its latest Series E funding round of 183 million euros ($196 million at today’s exchange rate), the company has reached a valuation of 2.7 billion euros ($2.9 billion).
Alan has integrated and automated as much as possible for its core product, the insurance part. It has also expanded to other services so that its app can be a sort of one-stop shop for all things related to your health.
After years of explosive growth, the French tech ecosystem has slowed with funding drying up and many companies looking for a quick exit — unless you work for an artificial intelligence company. As Alan is one of the largest private technology companies in France, it is interesting to follow the company closely to understand how it sees the future.
Another $63 million in losses in 2023
Despite a 39% increase in revenue in 2023 compared to 2022, Alan is still losing quite a bit of money. In 2023 alone, the company reported losses of $63 million (€59 million).
But things are getting better. Last year, 5,000 companies became new customers. In France, Alan is no longer the trendy health insurance company for tech start-ups, as new clients include Celio, Duracell, Mantu and Clinitex, as well as employees of the French National Assembly.
Alan also operates in Belgium and Spain. And the difference is quite clear in Spain, for example, as Alan names N26, Cabify and Eventbrite as new clients in the country — in other words, tech companies with local teams in Spain.
“Profitability is a key issue for us. Our goal was to reach profitability in 2025 for France. And we confirm it once again,” Bauple said. As for the other markets, the company says it expects to be profitable overall in 2026.
“Our cash position is over 180 million euros. Our solvency ratio is now 450%, which is well above the minimum requirement and twice the market average,” added Bauplé.
Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
Does this mean Alan is done with funding rounds? This part is a bit unclear as it has become much harder to raise late stage rounds at high valuations. Things could change. And of course, never say never.
“We don’t need to raise a new round to stay on plan and maintain this growth rate until we reach profitability,” Samuelian-Werve said later in the conversation. “At the same time, we have received unsolicited offers from investors in the past. . . we will continue to look at them, but today that is not our strategy.”
Increase revenue, not cost
Alan’s path to profitability involves growing the company’s bottom line without necessarily growing much as a team. Alan currently has a gross margin of 10% after deducting all health returns. But if you include all expenses, the net margin becomes negative at -17%.
In 2024, Alan expects to increase its revenue by 40%. But the company plans to hire only 30 people — a modest 5% increase in its workforce.
This is because Alan’s service is designed to scale well without necessarily adding more people. It is a self-service application and service. Refunds are automated as much as possible with visual character recognition, an in-house developed fraud mechanism, automated bank transfers, etc.
Preventive care in the app is also a big part of Alan’s offering with a focus on eight different topics ranging from mental health to back pain. This place mainly handles a video library and 80 healthcare professionals who work with Alan to answer questions through a messaging interface.
Alan also says that AI will be key when it comes to scaling. As with many customer support teams today, some of the interactions between Alan’s customers and her team are optimized by artificial intelligence.
But all teams leverage AI in one way or another. Alan CEO Samuelian-Werve told me that every employee is now 40% more productive.
They receive meeting reports much faster thanks to automatic transcriptions and summaries supported by LLM. They use Powder to query AI assistants with team data. Developers can iterate faster thanks to AI copilots.
Samuelian-Werve also happens to be a non-executive co-founder and board member of Mistral AI, France’s much talked about base model maker. In fact, Mistral AI’s office is in the same building as Alan’s office.
Although it’s harder to raise huge rounds of funding in France, AI can emerge as an alternative to ever-growing teams at Big Tech companies like Alan.
This might not work for every tech company, as Alan’s internal culture is quite peculiar. Everything is written and fully transparent with regular check-ins from teammates. However, it is a realistic example of the real impact of AI on the financial prospects of a growth-stage technology company.
Alan’s office roof. Image Credits: Alan
