A New Chapter for Thyme Care

Summary:

• Thyme Care ranks No. 18 on the 2026 Disruptor 50 list and reached a $1.1 billion valuation last year, six years after Robin Shah and Bobby Green co-founded the virtual care navigation platform in 2020.

• Incoming CEO Brad Diephuis is a primary care physician and a cancer survivor who says his focus is the stretch between appointments, which he describes as where care either holds together or falls apart.

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.

That led Shah, alongside Bobby Green, to co-found Thyme Care in 2020 based on the premise that cancer care is fragmented and most of the gaps show up outside the clinic.

The virtual care navigation platform has continued to grow, ranking No. 18 on the 2026 Disruptor 50 list and reaching a $1.1 billion valuation last year.

But this week, the company announced that Shah will transition into an executive chairman role to focus on launching new business lines, as Brad Diephuis, the company's current president and chief operating officer, will take over as CEO.

Diephuis spoke with us about the news, as well as how he plans to keep growing Thyme Care.

Q: You bring a unique perspective to this position, being a physician as well as a cancer survivor. How has that shaped how you want to lead as CEO?

A: Both experiences taught me the importance of balancing sweating the details while never losing sight of the big picture when it comes to patient care. In my own cancer journey, I experienced the incredible compassion of my care team and the power of life-saving therapies. But I also experienced the challenges of navigating an increasingly complex medical system when physically weak and emotionally stretched. As a primary care physician, when I had a patient going through serious illness, I viewed my role as being the advocate in the trenches with them, helping them figure out which specialist visits to prioritize, how to sift through sometimes conflicting recommendations, and navigating through challenging decisions.

That's why, as a CEO, I'm not somebody who likes to fly at 50,000 feet and stay there. When it comes to cancer care and the people we are responsible for at Thyme Care, the details matter; what I care most about protecting is my ability to dive in and really understand the actual experience of the people doing the work, what it's like for a care partner navigating our software forty hours a week, what it's like for a patient in the stretch between appointments. That's where care either holds together or falls apart, and it's the part of the system I'm most focused on. My job as CEO is to continue scaling what we do without losing the human experience that makes the model work.

Q: Since joining the company as Chief Business Officer in 2022, you’ve worked closely with co-founders Robin Shah and Bobby Green. What have you learned from being at a founder-led company, and how are you looking to put your stamp on things as CEO?

A: Robin and Bobby are both incredible entrepreneurs and have become dear friends. I’ve learned from both of them that the most powerful skill you can have as an early-stage founder is to believe so strongly in a mission and vision that you simply will it into existence. That’s what they’ve done at Thyme Care, alongside the amazing team we have. I've had the opportunity to see firsthand how they've grown Thyme Care from a concept on a whiteboard into a company with a proven model that delivers better outcomes for patients, providers, and health plans. As we’ve grown, we’ve found that ambitious vision only succeeds if you pair it with disciplined execution. In healthcare, you earn trust by proving your outcomes, listening to your partners, and staying relentlessly focused on patients.

This transition will be more of a step change than a pivot. As CEO, I want to stay close to the experience of our care teams, providers, and members so that as we grow we hold onto the quality and accountability that have defined Thyme Care from the beginning. We built a model that we know provides value to patients, providers, and health plans. My focus is bringing it to the many people diagnosed with cancer who still don't have this kind of support.

Q: As Thyme Care continues to grow, how do you balance scaling the business while also improving care for patients?

A: For us, these actually aren't in tension. Our growth is a function of the fact that our model is working. We’ve always believed that growth should be the result of delivering value, not the goal itself. As we’ve scaled, our focus has remained the same: deliver the outcomes we promised our customers and meaningfully improve the experience for people with cancer. We measure both relentlessly and hold ourselves accountable to those results. When health plans see the outcomes, understand the patient impact, and interact with our team, they expand their partnerships with us. When their members experience the value of our model, they stay engaged.

In 2025, we reported a 16% reduction in all-cause inpatient utilization, a 30% reduction in avoidable readmissions, and a 10% decrease in total cost of care for Medicare Advantage clients through value-based care interventions. These outcomes are the reason we’ve been able to grow.

Q: AI is reshaping so many parts of healthcare. Where do you see it having the greatest impact on improving oncological care?

A: AI will absolutely make clinicians more efficient, but I think its greatest impact will be enabling an entirely new model of proactive cancer care.

Here’s what I mean. We want to review every chart, every night, for every member enrolled in our program and assess it for rising clinical and social risk. Then, the next morning, we want to proactively intervene before that risk becomes a crisis.

Historically, delivering that level of continuous, personalized oversight at scale simply wasn’t feasible. AI makes it possible to identify who needs attention and to help our care teams focus their expertise where it matters most. It’s not about replacing clinicians, it’s about helping them reach every patient who needs them with the right intervention at the right time. There are a number of other ways we think that AI is going to be impactful, but we are taking a thoughtful and measured approach to making sure we deploy it safely while maintaining the critical human element of our model.

That’s where AI becomes transformative: not just making existing workflows more efficient, but making a level of proactive, personalized care possible that simply wasn’t before.

Q: The oncology care market is becoming increasingly crowded. What are you doing to continue to be a disruptor as opposed to being disrupted yourself?

A: There are two critical things that are special about Thyme Care. First, we've built connectivity between parties who aren't usually talking to each other. Good relationships with providers, good relationships with health plans, and really strong relationships with the patients we serve. And that’s a direct effect of the team we’ve built. Across the organization, we have an amazing and mission-driven team, and we have deep oncology and adjacent clinical expertise embedded across the company. That's a unique position in the cancer ecosystem, and it's hard to replicate because it isn't a feature or an add-on, it's our model.

We've proven both that there's a real market appetite for what we do and that we can execute against it, driving sustained impact for the members we serve. The way we stay ahead from there is by continuing to innovate on top of that. We're deepening our ability to do this at scale and refining how we measure and iterate, so we're growing in a way that's sustainable for the mature company we are today. Every patient we support teaches the platform something, and that continuous learning is what compounds over time.

When someone enrolls, we put a dedicated Care Team around them, a nurse, a care partner, and a social worker, overseen by nurse practitioners and physicians, available around the clock. And we coordinate closely with their treating oncologist. Because at the end of the day, nobody going through cancer wakes up asking for “high value” care. They want quality care, they want someone to take ownership, coordinate, and make it all make sense. That's what we've built, and how we’ll stay ahead.

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