Building personalized choice into healthcare with Thatch

I first met Thatch’s founders, Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson, before there was really a Thatch. It was before the company had a product or revenue, when Chris and Adam started with the simple observation that while employers pay for healthcare, the one-size-fits all benefits model is woefully insufficient for something as personal as health. 

Our institutional partnership with Thatch began in 2024, ahead of open enrollment season. We embedded TheGP builders alongside the Thatch team to automate insurance enrollments and payments, build critical partner integrations, and develop AI for customer support. The work also gave us a close view of the ambition behind what Chris and Adam were building and the quality of the team taking it on. 

We came away with even more conviction and invested capital in Thatch’s Series B, and kept building alongside the company across engineering, design, and talent.

Today, we’re proud to deepen that partnership again by leading Thatch’s $108 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation.

Healthcare’s matching problem and the opportunity of CHOICE

Many of the most consequential technology companies solve matching problems in large markets. They match riders with drivers, travelers with places to stay, listeners with music, or vendors with payment sources. Healthcare presents a matching problem that is more complex and personal than any of them. 

The traditional benefits model asks an employer to choose a small number of plans for an entire workforce. Thatch gives employers a different model. Companies set a healthcare budget, and employees use it to choose plans that better match their individual needs. An employee can select a plan that includes their doctor and use any remaining eligible expenses on things like therapy, GLP-1s, or preventative care. 

CHOICE arrangements (formerly known as ICHRA) made this model possible by allowing employers to provide tax-advantaged dollars that employees can use to purchase individual coverage.

But regulation alone does not create a functioning market. Making individualized health benefits work requires integrations across payroll, insurance carriers, enrollment systems, payments, reimbursements, compliance, renewals, and customer support. What appears simple to the employer or employee is only possible because someone has absorbed an enormous amount of complexity underneath it.

This is what Chris, Adam, and the Thatch team have built.

Thatch isn’t simply a CHOICE administrator, but an infrastructure layer for individualized healthcare that connects employers, employees, brokers, payroll platforms, carriers and healthcare providers all through one system. 

Building together 

Working alongside Thatch gave us a close-up view of how the team operates that’s hard to get from the outside — how they build, work together, and execute. Over six months, our engineers and designers embedded with the Thatch team, building integrations, automations and AI that made patient onboarding more efficient, improved customer support, and helped the team operate at scale through open enrollment. The timing of our partnership mattered because we were able to support Thatch at a pivotal moment, our engineers and recruiters working alongside the company as it prepared for open enrollment and continued to scale hiring. You can read more about that work here. 

Since its Series B, Thatch’s ARR has grown nearly sevenfold. The company now powers health benefits for more than 5,000 employers, and partnerships with Gusto, Justworks, Paychex, and ADP are making Thatch available to millions of businesses through the systems they already use. 

When I think about what will actually create a better healthcare system in the United States, I think about builders like Chris, Adam, and the Thatch team solving the fundamental problems of choice, continuity, and cost for individuals. 

We’ve had the privilege of knowing this team since the beginning, and of building alongside them as the company has grown. We’re excited to provide the capital required for this next chapter and to keep building together.