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 further reinforces that an African startup can be built for a global acquisition, as Tanel sold to an investor it spent two years reporting to, from a market that does not appear in any of the continent’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 it was bought by a European acquirer 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