In 2016 two men set out to do something the French insurance industry had not seen in three decades: ask the regulator for an insurer's licence of their own. Alan describes itself as the first company to be granted one since 1986. That is a strange place to start a startup. Insurance is a business of trust and capital, and a newcomer has neither.
The founders were Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, who became CEO, and Charles Gorintin, who took technology. They picked health, the part of insurance that most French employees touch every year and complain about most. Claims forms, delays, phone queues. The pitch was simple: build the insurer like a software company, so a member can do everything in an app.
What almost nobody outside the industry notices is how much the licence mattered.
The early years were not glamorous. Alan's own year-in-review for 2018 describes the first minimum viable product, and the company says it found its first product-market fit in 2017. By the end of 2018 it insured close to 25,000 members across about 2,000 companies. That is small by insurer standards, but for a company that did not yet have a track record it was proof that small French firms would hand their staff's health cover to a stranger.
What almost nobody outside the industry notices is how much the licence mattered. Because Alan was an insurer, not a broker, it controlled pricing, claims and customer service itself. It could fix a bad process the same week it found it.
The money followed. Index Ventures became the anchor backer, and in September 2024 Alan was valued at EUR 4.5bn. But growth in insurance is expensive: the company reported losses of EUR 61m in 2023 and EUR 56m in 2024, the price of paying claims on members it had won with low prices and good service.
Then the numbers turned. In March 2026 Alan raised about EUR 100m at a valuation near EUR 5bn, with Index again leading and Greenoaks, Kaaf, SH and Belfius joining; angels included Shopify's Tobi Lutke and footballer Antoine Griezmann. It reported EUR 785m in annualised recurring revenue for 2025, up 53%, and said it was operationally profitable in France. It also won a contract to cover up to 135,000 civil servants and their families, the kind of customer a 2016 newcomer would not have dreamed of.
The lesson for founders is the unglamorous one. Alan did not invent health insurance. It went through the hardest door in the industry, the licence, and then treated every form, delay and phone queue as a bug to fix. The moat was the boring permission nobody else had bothered to earn.