Alan Acquires Senegal's Tanel — a Portfolio Company It Backed Since 2024
French digital health insurer Alan, an investor in Tanel since its 2024 seed round, has acquired the Senegalese health-coverage startup outright — its first move into Africa — with Ventures Platform, a backer of Tanel since 2021, among the early investors who saw the relationship through to exit.
Alan, a French digital health insurer serving over 1 million members across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada, has acquired Tanel, a Senegalese digital health coverage provider it first invested in during Tanel's 2024 seed round. The deal, announced September 2, closed in June. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Tanel was founded in 2021 by Mouhamed Ndoye and Makhtar Diop and has been backed by Ventures Platform — the pan-African VC that closed an $84 million second fund in August — since its earliest days. Alan joined as an investor in the company's 2024 seed round, valued at $7.5 million at the time.
Tanel operates in Senegal and Ivory Coast, covering roughly 70,000 people across more than 400 companies, including ride-hailing company Yango and KFC, and connects them to over 1,200 pharmacies and healthcare providers. Alan, which generates approximately €840 million in annual recurring revenue, has been looking beyond its saturated European home markets for growth.
Tanel will be rebranded under the Alan name, with its existing leadership staying on. The combined companies are targeting more than 1 million African members by 2030, with Tanel first consolidating in Senegal and Ivory Coast before expanding into English-speaking West and East African markets.
"We looked at different opportunities for expansion and we were lucky to know the Tanel team for one year and a half," said Alan CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve.
Tanel co-founder Ndoye described the acquisition as growing out of an ongoing relationship rather than an active sale process: "That was actually our initial plan earlier this year. But as we were discussing with Alan, we realised that it was a great opportunity to join forces." Ndoye has also said the two companies kept in close contact after the 2024 investment, including monthly calls and investor updates — the kind of relationship that made an eventual acquisition a natural next step rather than a cold approach.
The headline framing — "European insurer makes first African acquisition" — undersells what actually happened here: Alan didn't cold-acquire a target, it converted an 18-month investor relationship into full ownership, and Tanel's own earliest backer, Ventures Platform, is a firm Lemina already tracks closely (VP closed an $84M Fund II in August). That makes this less a one-off acquisition and more a case study in how patient, relationship-driven African VC capital actually pays off — Tanel's founders explicitly credit "patient investors who let us build the core product without demanding revenue targets every quarter" as the reason this outcome was possible at all. For investors pricing Francophone African healthtech, Tanel's $7.5M 2024 valuation is now one of the only real reference points with a confirmed exit attached, even with acquisition terms undisclosed. And for anyone tracking Ventures Platform's portfolio — which Lemina's own database already covers — this is the first realized outcome from that book showing up in public reporting, worth watching for what it signals about exit timelines on VP's other bets.
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