Alan - Q1 2021 Letter to shareholders

Last January, we published our 2020 letter to shareholders on our blog. As we share quarterly updates with our investors, we want to keep sharing them with our community.

Please find below the email we sent to our investors following the first quarter of 2021. We slightly edited it to remove sensitive information.

Dear Alan friends,

I hope that this letter finds you well, and that you, your loved ones and friends are all safe and staying healthy.

We are beating our targets for both signed members and signed revenue (156.1k members and over €100m ARR). It is mostly due to a good pipeline we built during 2020, and cancellation at any time (the new law that was enforced in December 2020) which removes seasonality on our 🇫🇷 market.

We have also seen a step change in brand awareness (from 6% to 14% among the general population in Brand Preference) and also anecdotally seen (not measured) a strong increase of awareness with large corporations.

We have underperformed on customer service. At the start of the year we had a surge in inbound member contact due to a combination of a doubling of live members relative to December and usual seasonality. This led to a material increase in customer wait times and required us to completely turn-off our live chat feature for a period of several weeks. Following a very strong effort from the entire team the situation is now back to normal with live chat times below 5 minutes and asynchronous questions handled in 6 hours on average; both metrics are in line with our targets. We have put in place measures to forecast and absorb future surges.

We are seeing elevated levels of healthcare consumption across all cohorts, across all products and from most types of care acts. It seems to be a trend for the whole market in the lockdown context.

We also believe we are building an “Alan Effect” where our frictionless experience and proactive care notifications (eg. dental and pediatric) help our members access the healthcare in a timely manner.

At Alan, we think long-term. We think that creating new positive habits for our members on how they take care of their health is very powerful and aligned with our strategy of being the personalised healthcare partner for each of our members. By scaling and becoming the personalised healthcare partner, we will be able to help our members navigate the healthcare system, guiding them towards a delightful experience while also being able to control the cost of care.

__On January 25th we launched Alan Baby on the French iOS App Store. Alan Baby is a standalone parenting app that provides (i) access to medical chat with general practitioners, (ii) communities for exchanges with parents facing similar challenges and (iii) content curated for the baby’s age.

Now that the foundations are in place, we expect Q2 to be when we build a “too-good-to-be-true” experience. In the coming weeks, we’re going to position Alan Baby as a personal digital parenting companion, providing continuous support to parents.

We keep building a delightful health insurance experience, thanks to some big achievements from the team:

For the next quarter, our main focuses will be to:

The main focuses of Alan at the international scale this quarter was on hiring, improving the core member experience and developing an updated value proposition.

In 🇪🇸 we launched a medical video and chat service for members, removing a key blocker for sales seen in 2020.

In 🇧🇪 we launched medical chat and a psychological hotline, while a dental product is to be released soon.

The sales teams are ramping up in both countries with good early signals.

Our team grew from 261 people to 339 (+78) since the end of 2020, with notably 31 more people in the Sales community. We are also gaining momentum in Belgium (+10) and Spain (+6).

We are thrilled by the latest key hires that the team made. Here is a non-exhaustive sample:

For the rest of 2021, our focus is on hiring additional engineering and product talent as well as increasing the overall diversity within the engineering team; which is currently trending in the wrong direction.

We have taken lots of actions so far to go into powering more diversity, including (i) our unique Salary grid and Equity grid which ensure equal reward based on impact and experience, (ii) our rule for annual salary increase based on experience accruals, (iii) 100% salary maintenance during maternity leave without seniority conditions (iv) Paternity leave extended to 5 weeks, also paid at 100%. We are looking at going further on these topics to remain a socially innovative company.

We are announcing our €185 million (€150m primary) series D fundraising at a €1.4bn valuation (Press Release)

The round is led by Coatue, with additional participation from new investors including Dragoneer and Exor, as well as existing investors Index Ventures, Temasek and Ribbit Capital.

We are thrilled and honored by the quality of our partners and the alignment with our long-term vision.

With the new funding we are prioritising 2021 investments as follows:

I’m very proud of the team during this first quarter of 2021. It has been tremendously packed -- and we love it. All Alaners have been working very hard to deliver the best results and support our European ambition, and I am once again very grateful and impressed by the achievements of the team.

We are building Alan to be THE place people go to for all of their health and well-being needs, the healthcare super-app for hundreds of millions of European.

In order to achieve that objective, we maniacally focus on maximizing the value we create for our members.

We prioritize growth and engagement because we believe that scale is central to achieving the full potential of our business model.

__With critical mass, we can guide members through the healthcare system to optimise the combination of health outcomes and costs. __

Thanks to you all for being part of Alan.

Let’s continue to transform healthcare together,

Jean-Charles