French healthcare platform Alan, cofounded by Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and Charles Gorintin, announced today that it has raised a €185M Series D which puts the company in the unicorn club, at a €1.4 billion valuation. The funding round was led by Coatue, along with Dragoneer, Exor, and existing investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek.

Alan is a fully licensed health insurance company, which allows members to access various types of health-related content. The platform sends notifications appointments to its users, helps them find doctors through their map, books them, and offers interactions like chatting with doctors and other patients.

“For more than 50 years they have tried to industrialize our healthcare system, and as a result they it a bit inhuman, non-personal, where you have to fit with the system, while it should be the contrary — the system should fit to you,” Samuelian-Werve, who serves as the company’s CEO, says. “We want to be the place where you get your information in a personal way, offering you an integrated experience from A to Z where healthcare is no longer pain you have to go through, but it can even be joyful in some way because it’s preventative and cheaper.”

Roughly 85% of Alan’s customers are companies (when they sign on a company they cover 100% of their employees) so its a B2B2C model, while the remaining 15% are self-employed. At the moment Alan counts 9,000 companies that use it with 160,000 members. The company originally started in France, and as of six months ago expanded to Spain and Belgium. While not profitable yet, the company recently surpassed €100m in annual revenue.

Prior to cofounding Alan, Samuelian-Werve started another successful company called Expliseat, a manufacturer of the light aircraft seats. However, after his grandfather passed away, Samuelian-Werve (who as a kid built websites for Japanese anime, local shops, and a French movie) sold his shares in it and decided that he wanted to focus on healthcare. He teamed up with college classmate Charles Gorintin, who had previously worked for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (and is now Alan’s CTO), and the two worked on the idea for one summer in Gorintin’s San Francisco apartment prior to moving back to their native France.

Alan's platform

 ALAN

The two created the company in February of 2016, got their insurance license in October, and went live in November of the same year.

They name Alan was a reference to two Englishmen: mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing and philosopher Alan Watts (who wrote a lot about well-being).

The company, headquartered in Paris, currently hires 350 people and had previously raised €125M. With the latest funding round, the total amount of equity financing has grown to €310 million.

Jan Hammer, a partner at Index Ventures which has invested in Alan since their Series A and participated in this round, says that what Alan ultimately wants to do is connect the providers of healthcare with patients through a personalized digital platform.

They offer a customized individual solution that really empowers the users to take care of their own health,” Hammer says. “While there are some companies writing software to create electronic patient records, in a way this will emanate out of the data, it will be your personal record solutions that are tailored to you.”