Thyme Care CFO wants to ‘bend the cost curve’

Since Jesse Waldron became Thyme Care’s first CFO in early 2024, the company’s experienced explosive growth. Thyme Care, which partners with health care payers to help cancer patients navigate care, completed a $60 million Series B round several months before Waldron joined. It became profitable in 2025.

Recently, Thyme Care announced a $125 million Series E round with investors including Morgan Health, Humana, and CVS Health Ventures, taking it to a valuation of over $2 billion.

Essentially, what Thyme does is to make sure that a health plan’s cancer patients are going to their appointments, taking care of themselves, and “not falling through the cracks,” Waldron told CFO Brew.

In an interview, he also discussed operating leverage, the financial risks built into the company’s contracts with health plans, and the choices that come with managing a high-growth business.

This interview has been edited for length and quality.

In the time that you’ve been CFO, Thyme Care has seen tremendous growth. How has your team changed over that period?

When I started, it was a very small team. We just had a couple of people on the team, and over time, we have built out the finance function to really support the broader organization…The one area that’s changed probably the most is our actuarial function, which when I started was very nascent and now is a very big part of our business. We have 135,000 members that we are helping to manage. We are taking risk on those patients, so it’s very important for us to get pricing and contracting and structure down in a meaningful way.

Around this time last year, Thyme Care became profitable for the first time. What changes did you make that brought the company to profitability?

A lot of our early contracts were very small in nature. It was pilot programs within a bunch of the large national contracts in which you have to deploy resources to prove the model works, and as you start to scale those into many more geographies and to serve more members, you start to realize a lot of operating leverage…We proved the unit economics very early on with small scale, and then as we got bigger, a lot of that just propelled us to being able to get to profitability and generate positive cash flow.

Can you tell me more about the “proving it” piece? How do you determine or assess patient outcomes?

A lot of our contracts are very aligned to both clinical outcomes and financial outcomes. So at the end of the day, a lot of our contracts are structured around: Are you saving money to the health plan? So we sort of take total cost of care risk on a population of patients…They pay us an upfront payment to help manage those members, and then we guarantee the payer that we will save that amount of money that they are paying us, plus an increment on top of that, and then anything above and beyond that goes into a shared savings pool.

And so we have proved to them that we are meeting all those guarantees, and we are lowering the total cost of care across those populations. In conjunction with a lot of those contracts in which we are performing well financially, there are tons of quality measures of, are we improving patients’ clinical outcomes at the end of the day? Are we reducing hospitalizations? Are we reducing inpatient admissions? Are we impacting the drug spend for those patients? Are we impacting the out-of-pocket spend [for] those patients…when they are going through their treatment? So we have a whole host of measures. We are very focused both on the financial perspective of bending the cost curve, but also on the patient perspective.

What advice would you give a fellow CFO who’s also experiencing high growth?

You have to use this as an opportunity to accelerate the business so that you can create a durable model and a durable financial picture so that the business continues to grow and scale over time. You want to make sure that you are still making the right investments and the right decisions when you’ve got a lot of runway ahead of you…Because when you’re growing fast and you have a lot of money, it is easy for people to say, “We need to hire tons of people to do all these things. We want to do all these new initiatives”…Making sure that you can prioritize the things that are going to lead to continued growth over time is probably the most important thing.