(This story is from our new Health Tech newsletter. If you’d like to sign up, just click here.)
Thyme Care’s latest funding round bumped its valuation to $480 million, more than double what it was a year ago, a source close to the company told Endpoints News.
The Nashville-based startup, which helps patients navigate cancer treatment, announced on Tuesday that it raised a $95 million Series C round about a year after it closed a $60 million Series B – offering more proof that the digital health funding market is heating up again after several weak financing years in which many startups struggled to stay afloat.
Brad DiephuisThyme wasn’t actively looking to raise funds but had an opportunity to add capital and bring on a new investor in Concord Health Partners, Thyme COO Brad Diephuis said in an interview with Endpoints.
Existing investors CVS Health, Town Hall Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and others also participated in the round, bringing Thyme’s total funding to $178 million.
Founded in 2020, Thyme’s team of doctors, nurses, social workers and other clinicians support patients virtually as they go through cancer treatment, with the goal of helping them achieve better health outcomes and a better experience while lowering the total cost of care for the health insurers and risk-bearing medical groups it contracts with.
It does that by helping patients avoid unnecessary hospital admissions by monitoring their symptoms and working with their doctors to intervene early if there’s a complication.
It also partners with oncology groups, setting up financial incentives to encourage those practices to, when possible, substitute lower-cost cancer drugs that are equally as effective as more expensive ones, co-founder and chief medical officer Bobby Green told Endpoints.
Typically, Thyme gets paid a fixed fee for its services from the insurers or at-risk provider groups to manage a set of patients. It gets to share in any cost savings it generates; if it doesn’t save money, it refunds its fees. Diephuis said Thyme has been able to generate roughly $600 in savings per month for the patients in its care.
“The types of interventions that we’re doing are not novel in the sense that they’ve never been done before,” Diephuis said. “The challenge is that there usually isn’t the financial business model in the fee-for-service system to support those on an ongoing basis.”
Thyme manages about 10,000 patients, and it plans to triple that number in the next year, Diephuis said. With the latest raise, Thyme is in a position to get to profitability, he said.