Dakar healthtech Tanel acquired by French insurance unicorn Alan

Alan, the French health insurance company, has acquired Tanel, a Dakar-based digital health startup operating in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, for an undisclosed amount that marks its first move into Africa.

The transaction closed in June and gives Ventures Platform, AAIC Investment, and a group of angel investors a full exit and breaks almost every pattern the African exit market has recently shown.

The deal reinforces that African startups can be built for global acquisition: Tanel sold to an investor it had spent two years reporting to, from a market missing entirely from Africa’s exit data.

“The plan was to raise the Series A earlier this year, and then Alan reached out, and we ran a dual process,” Mouhamed Ndoye, Tanel’s CEO, said in an interview with TechCabal. “At some point we realised that going through the acquisition with Alan was more interesting for us, given the opportunity to expand across Africa.”

The big four markets—Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya—accounted for 81% of disclosed African exits between 2011 and 2026, according to research from Ventures Platform and Stears that tracked 181 verified venture-backed exits. A third of those exits came from financial services.

As a healthtech startup in Francophone West Africa, Tanel does not fit the usual pattern, and an European acquirer bought it at a time when foreign buyers have been pulling back. International acquirers made up 56% of disclosed exits in 2020. By 2025, that share had fallen to 33%. 

Tanel was founded in 2021 by Mouhamed Ndoye and Makhtar Diop to fix how Senegalese employers manage health coverage, which was still largely paper-based. It started with pharmacy management software and expanded across the patient journey. 

The founders had tried to fix Senegalese healthcare through in-home primary care and prescription delivery but hit a brick wall each time. They concluded the infrastructure they needed did not exist, so they built it, starting with pharmacies and expanding across the patient journey.

The startup is a licenced insurer and carries the risk itself, which sets it apart from startups that simply administer another underwriter’s cover. Tanel sells mainly to employers and designs health plans for their staff. It built its own contracted network of pharmacies, hospitals, and clinics in both markets so patients get care directly instead of paying upfront and claiming back.

Tanel now covers about 70,000 lives across more than 400 companies and connects users to more than 1,200 pharmacies and healthcare providers, Ndoye said. About 30,000 of those covered are paying customers, with each policy extending to a spouse and children. Ndoye said Tanel was profitable in 2025 but declined to give revenue figures, and at the time of the acquisition, Senegal accounted for 90% of revenue and Côte d’Ivoire for 10%.

Tanel raised $2.45 million across two rounds before the acquisition: $350,000 in a pre-seed and $2.1 million in a 2024 seed round. Ndoye and Diop are staying on as general managers, both reporting directly to Alan’s chief executive. Ndoye said the arrangement has been autonomous so far and that the whole Tanel team is moving into equivalent roles at Alan.

How an investment became an acquisition

Alan backed Tanel in that 2024 seed round, and Ndoye said he stayed close to Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Alan’s chief executive, afterwards, with monthly calls and monthly investor updates. That gave the French company two years of visibility into the business before it moved.

Alan made the first approach, asking whether Tanel’s founders would consider a sale. “There was a lot of alignment over the last few years,” Ndoye said. “We realised they are very similar in culture and similar in mission, so we said, why not go down this route?”

The sequence resembles the one that produced one of Africa’s biggest exits. Stripe led Paystack’s $8 million Series A in 2018, watched the company scale for two years, then acquired it outright in October 2020 in a deal worth $200 million. Ndoye called the comparison “a bit similar”, noting that Alan came in earlier, at seed stage, and at a far smaller company.

Neither company disclosed the price, and Ndoye declined to give a range or to say how much was cash and how much was Alan stock. He described the outcome as “meaningful” for the investors involved. “We are in the health insurance space, so there were some regulatory clearances, but they went through very quickly,” Ndoye said about the acquistion’s regulatory process.

Tanel never set up an employee share scheme and had planned to do so at Series A but sold before it got there. Ndoye said Alan gives shares to every employee as company policy, so Tanel’s staff will now get Alan stock.

What changes for Tanel

The most immediate operational change is reinsurance. Tanel had been underwriting and carrying its own risk on a balance sheet built from $2.45 million in total funding. Reinsurance lets an insurer pass part of its exposure to a larger balance sheet, freeing up capital and allowing it to write bigger books. 

“We take on the risk. That is something we have managed ourselves,” Ndoye said. “One of the good things about Alan is that we now benefit from reinsurance, because Alan works with global reinsurers able to take that on.”

The second change is product. Ndoye described Alan as a company that has moved from paying claims after the fact toward flagging health risks before they escalate and said Tanel’s customers will get access to that. Alan raised €480 million in June and said it would spend part of it on acquisitions, AI, and healthcare services. The company said at the time that it would also use the money to expand into new countries and pursue acquisitions. Tanel is the first of those in Africa.

“It is the story of moving from just paying for health insurance, which is reactive, to being proactive, looking at your health and telling you what might happen so you stay healthier in the long run,” Ndoye said. Alan sells health insurance bundled with prevention tools and support and says it has more than 1.2 million members across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. It reported more than $927 million in annual recurring revenue in the first quarter of 2026, growing 53% year on year, and is profitable in France.

After the acquisition, Tanel plans to strengthen its operations in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire before expanding outside both markets. Ndoye named Kenya and Nigeria as the Anglophone targets and said the company is also looking at more Francophone markets. Alan and Tanel say they want to reach one million customers across Africa by 2030.

“Technology can widen access to care at scale only when it is paired with teams that know their markets,” Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, Alan’s co-founder and chief executive, said, pointing to the relationships Tanel built with regulators, providers, and employers in both countries.

The investor case

For Ventures Platform, the deal is a proof point for a thesis the firm has been arguing publicly. Dotun Olowoporoku, its managing partner, said the firm backed Tanel for what Senegal makes possible across the region. “We didn’t back Tanel because Senegal is a big market,” Olowoporoku said in an interview. “We backed Tanel because Senegal is a market they can dominate and replicate the same playbook in the Francophone region.”

He described Francophone West Africa as eight countries sharing one currency, one language of business, and broadly the same regulatory framework, so winning one market produces a template for the next. Tanel tested that when it carried its Senegal playbook into Côte d’Ivoire, and Olowoporoku said proving it worked twice is what made the company attractive to a buyer looking for a multi-market operator.

What convinced the firm to invest, he said, was that Ndoye and Diop got an insurance licence before building the technology. The return matters as much as the thesis for Ventures Platform, which closed its $84 million second fund in August, and Kola Aina, its general partner, has said publicly that he treats strategic sales as the goal and calls public listings “somewhat mythical.”

“It means cash back to our LPs,” Olowoporoku said, “which in this market is the only argument that settles the conversation about exit,” adding that African companies are usually bought by companies that want a licence, a moat, a product, a network, or an operating team they cannot build.

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