Founders: Robin Shah (CEO), Bobby Green
Launched: 2020
Headquarters: Nashville, Tennessee
Funding: $235 million
Valuation: N/A
Key Technologies: N/A
Industry: Healthcare
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 0
Thyme Care founder Robin Shah grew up around cancer patients. His father ran an oncology practice, and Shah spent years there, seeing the practice get through the Great Recession as well as competition from hospital systems. One observation that stuck with him: patients got care during their appointments but were left to fend for themselves in between.
Shah went on to become an early employee at Flatiron Health and a founding team member at One Oncology before launching Thyme Care with co-founder Bobby Green in 2020. The company's premise is based on what he observed early in life and then in his career: cancer care is fragmented and most of the gaps show up outside the clinic.
"The system was not designed for people with cancer, and too often patients fall through the cracks," Shah said in a statement at the time of a major fundraising round last September.
To narrow those gaps, Thyme Care connects cancer patients with personalized care and resources. The company draws on clinical, claims, and behavioral data to identify patients at risk and coordinates support with care navigators, clinical outreach, and palliative care between visits. It works with more than 1,400 oncologists and partners with health plans to deliver what the industry calls value-based care, where the insurer pays for better outcomes, not just more services.
Its virtual care navigation platform is powered by over 500 healthcare professionals, including oncology nurses, nurse practitioners, and care navigators.
More than eight million Americans now have access to the company's services, and Thyme Care says it influences $5 billion in oncology spending.
The company raised $97 million in a Series D investment in September from current investors such as CVS Health Ventures, as well as new investors Morgan Health, Humana, Texas Oncology, and Memorial Hermann. Humana and CVS are also customers. A prior $95 million round had closed a year earlier.
The company has been expanding its services, such as survivorship care, to address quality-of-life gaps that occur past active treatment. But Thyme Care is operating in a crowded oncology value-based care market and competitors include Color Health and Atlas Oncology.
The broader challenge for Thyme Care, and the oncology space generally, is showing consistent savings and clinical value to health plans at scale. That's difficult because oncology is among the most expensive and unpredictable areas of healthcare, with high drug costs and the fragmented care that attracted the company's attention in the first place. According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is a major cost driver for employers and costs have increased by more than 50% between 2017 and 2025. In addition to increasing drug prices, a growing number of younger workers are now getting cancer. Health plans generally renew contracts only when the economics are clear.
Shah told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview on Wednesday that Thyme Care is driving greater than 5% medical expense reduction for many health plan partners and expects that to grow as it invests in more areas.
The company has increased the patients it serves – from that broader population of eight million Americans diagnosed with cancer who have access – from the 85,000 on its platform at the end of last year to 120,000 currently. "We've scaled pretty meaningfully," he said.
"We're having millions of interactions with patients and sitting on all of this data to make sure we can support cancer patients in the best way through their journey, navigating through treatment and after-care," he added.
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