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Alan’s meteoric rise in the French tech ecosystem has been both figurative and literal. A few years ago, the startup’s offices were limited to a single floor in a nondescript office building near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris.
Over time, the company added another floor, then another floor… Now, the company with 550 employees also occupies the top floor of the building. It is a common space with a kitchen in one corner and a beautiful view of the gray zinc roofs typical of Paris.
This morning, Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, co-founder and CEO of Alan, and Ludovic Bauulé, Chief Revenue Officer, held a press conference with a group of journalists. Some of them cover tech startups, others focus on the insurance industry. It’s an unusual mix of journalists, but that’s because Alan is unusual company.
The company initially started with a health insurance product complementary to the national health system in France. French companies must offer a health insurance product to all their employees when they join. Today, more than 500,000 people are covered by Alan’s insurance product.
Image credits: Romain Dillet/TechCrunch
But Alan is also a technology company that has raised numerous rounds of funding. With its latest Series E funding round of €183 million ($196 million at current exchange rates), the company reached a valuation of €2.7 billion ($2.9 billion).
Alan has integrated and automated as many things as possible for his flagship product, the insurance part. It has also expanded into other services so its app can be a sort of one-stop shop for everything related to your health.
After years of explosive growth, the French tech ecosystem in slow motion with funding drying up and many companies looking for a quick exit — unless you work for a generative AI company. As Alan is one of the largest private technology companies in France, it is worth keeping a close eye on the company to understand how it sees the future.
Still $63 million in losses in 2023
Despite revenue growth of 39% in 2023 compared to 2022, Alan is still losing quite a bit of money. In 2023 alone, the company reported $63 million in losses (59 million euros).
But things are improving. 5,000 businesses became new customers last year. In France, Alan is no longer the trendy health insurance company of technology startups since its new clients include Celio, Duracell, Mantu, Clinitex and even employees of the French National Assembly.
Alan also operates in Belgium and Spain. And the difference is quite clear in Spain for example, where Alan cites N26, Cabify and Eventbrite as new clients in the country – in other words, technology companies with local teams in Spain.
“Profitability is a central subject for us. Our objective was to achieve profitability in 2025 for France. And we confirm it once again,” declared Ludovic Bauulé. As for other markets, the company says it expects to be globally profitable in 2026.
“Our cash flow amounts to more than 180 million euros. Our solvency ratio now stands at 450%, which is well above the minimum required and twice the market average,” added Bauulé.
Image credits: Romain Dillet/TechCrunch
Does this mean Alan is done with financing rounds? This part is a little fuzzy because it has become much more difficult to do late-stage funding rounds at high valuations. Things could change. And of course, never say never.
“We don’t need to launch a new funding round to stick to the plan and maintain this growth rate until we reach profitability,” Jean-Charles 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 examine them, but today, that is not really our strategy.
Increase revenue, not costs
Alan’s path to profitability involves growing the company’s bottom line without necessarily growing as a team. Currently, Alan has a 10% gross margin after deducting all healthcare reimbursements. But if we include all expenses, the net margin becomes negative at -17%.
In 2024, Alan plans to increase his turnover by 40%. But the company only plans to hire 30 people, a modest 5% increase in its workforce.
Indeed, Alan’s service has been designed to scale without necessarily adding additional people. It is a self-service application and service. Refunds are maximally automated with optical character recognition, an in-house developed fraud engine, automated bank transfers, and more.
In-app preventative care is also a big part of Alan’s offering, with a focus on eight different topics ranging from mental health to back pain. This part is mainly managed by a library of videos and 80 healthcare professionals who partner with Alan to answer questions via a messaging interface.
Alan also says that artificial intelligence will be key when it comes to scaling. As is the case with many customer support teams today, some of Alan’s customer interactions with his team are powered by artificial intelligence.
But all teams leverage artificial intelligence in one way or another. Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, CEO of Alan, told me that every employee is now 40% more productive.
They get meeting reports much faster with automatic transcriptions and summaries powered by LLM. They use Dust to query AI assistants with team data. Developers can iterate faster with AI co-pilots.
Samuelian-Werve is also a non-executive co-founder and board member of Mistral AI, the founding model maker who is talked about a lot in France. In fact, Mistral AI’s office is located in the same building as Alan’s.
If it is more difficult to raise massive fundraising in France, artificial intelligence could appear as an alternative to the ever-increasing teams in large technology companies like Alan.
This might not work for all tech companies, as Alan’s internal culture is quite unique. Everything is written and fully transparent with regular check-ins from teammates. Nevertheless, it is a pragmatic example of the real impact of artificial intelligence on the financial prospects of a growth-stage technology company.
The roof of Alan’s office. Image credits: Alan
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