With Mbappé on its team, Alan is playing a whole new ball game

The 2026 World Cup may give the impression that footballers could advertise anything and everything, but not French soccer star Kylian Mbappé, who has been more selective. This adds weight to his involvement as investor and ambassador at Alan, a French unicorn that provides one million-plus members with health insurance on behalf of their employers.

Now valued at €5.5 billion and operating in four countries, this European health insurer has certainly received much larger checks than Mbappé’s — the latest is a €400 million investment from global tech investor Prosus alone. But France’s captain also became a “teammate” of Alan — and of AI — in its goal to put prevention front and center.

With an in-app challenge called “Move with Mbappé,” and with his endorsement, Alan encouraged its users to follow the athlete’s footsteps and become more active. That game ended when Mbappé met the winner before taking off for the U.S., but it reflects Alan’s use of technology to align incentives and nudge its members in the right direction.

Gamified nudging is also how Alan landed Mbappé as an investor. “His mother, Fayza, was using Alan, [walking] more steps thanks to us, so they got to know us,” its co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve said in a talk attended by The Infinite Loop during the South Summit Madrid conference in early June.

Amid mounting costs, shifting from treatment to prevention has become a necessity; but Alan still hopes to move faster than the incumbents it joined when it received its health insurance license in 2016 — a first in France since 1986.

“The idea behind Alan is that health cannot wait — health cannot wait for you to find an appointment to the doctor, you to get reimbursed, you to act on the small problems that could become very big if you don't cure it,” Samuelian-Werve said on stage.

Many health insurers have now realized that AI can be part of the answer, but Alan was arguably early to the game. Samuelian-Werve and his co-founder Charles Gorintin, Alan’s CTO, are also non-operating co-founders and board members at French AI champion Mistral, and didn’t miss that machine learning could help process reimbursements and queries faster.

For Alan, automation unsurprisingly translates into significant savings — €300,000 for just one month, Samuelian-Werve disclosed on LinkedIn. This also comes at a cost — many of the lower ratings of Alan on Trustpilot are from users complaining that chatbots had them running in circles when a human agent would have been better suited to solve their case.

Still, the company is doing better than average on the customer satisfaction front, with a reported net promoter score above 68.

Alan wouldn’t be as liked if it weren’t for automation, which helps it answer member requests in 20 seconds on average. That’s also why it has built Mo, which aims to go beyond customer service and insurance-related questions. Now available to all Alan members in France, it is positioned by the company as an AI healthcare companion that can switch topics fast.

Early data gathered by Alan indicates that members do ask medical questions to Mo — often relating to symptoms, or to decision making. That’s also where mistakes could cost lives, which is why Alan has added guardrails. “Every message is verified by a doctor within 15 minutes,” the company stated when it started deploying Mo in 2024. 

The fact that AI alone may not be ready for triage hasn’t stopped doctors and patients from asking health-related questions to the likes of ChatGPT. In January 2026, its parent company OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health. But for Alan's CEO, Mo has an edge “because it knows your history, past claims, family, and past interactions with [Alan’s] medical team.”

Using this context, Mo can also act proactively, suggesting checkups, booking appointments, and building gamified routines with Alan Play based on findings from Alan’s new blood test, Alan Precision. This approach is what keeps members coming back:: in 2025, its app claimed 26% weekly active users and 10% daily active users.

What makes these usage levels manageable at scale is automation. The company claims to have adopted AI as its operating model; for example with Hopper, an internal tool that lets all of its team contribute to the code. With only 850 full-time employees, or “Alaners,” the company now targets €1 billion in annual recurring revenue for 2026.

In a market dominated by non-profits, Alan’s hybrid positioning has raised questions. The countries where it operates — France, Belgium, Spain, and Canada — have health systems where mandatory insurance isn't priced based on health status. But there is still something slightly unnerving about asking very personal health questions to a privately owned chatbot paid for by your employer, even though strict walls are in place to maintain confidentiality.

Since the main privacy-related risk in this context would most likely come from data leaks, some of Alan's reassurance on these issues will stem from which models it uses, where it stores its data, and how it plans to keep it safe. Despite its tech savviness, it may not have much of a leg up, as France’s tsunami of data breaches in recent months also affected one of its providers. 

Its competition is exploring AI too. There’s market leader Vyv, for instance, but also Doctolib. This French unicorn already owns a staggering share of the appointment booking layer, and the overlap with Alan could increase. In a LinkedIn post, Samuelian-Werve summed up a test in which Alan demonstrated that voice AI could help reduce the cost burden of canceled appointments for healthcare providers.

While foreign LLMs will also go after this market, Alan is preemptively reinforcing its moat for the AI era by embedding itself deeper into the lives of its members, while seeking to align incentives from all sides. “The future of health is built at the intersection of insurance, prevention, care and AI,” Samuelian-Werve wrote. It is hard to see how competitors would disagree, perhaps leaving Alan with no other option than to outrace them.

Top photo: Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve (on the left), Alan’s CTO and co-founder Charles Gorintin. Credit: Alan