A 2019 footnote, turned into a company
In late 2023, Chris Ellis put a product into the world built on a rule almost nobody had read. The Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement - ICHRA - took effect in 2019 and let employers hand workers tax-free dollars to buy their own individual health plans. Most of the benefits industry shrugged. Ellis saw the seam in the whole system.
Thatch, the company he runs as co-founder and CEO, turns that rule into software. An employer sets a monthly allowance. The employee shops for the plan that actually covers their doctors, and spends what is left over on therapy, fertility care, glasses, or a dozen other services in Thatch's marketplace. It looks less like an HR benefit and more like a debit card with a tax advantage - which is exactly the point. Ellis likes to compare it to the moment companies stopped picking your retirement portfolio and handed you a 401(k).
Within months of launch the platform had more than 100 paying companies. By 2025 it had crossed a thousand, most of them small businesses that had never been able to get a traditional group health quote. The cap table reads like a fintech all-star roster: Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Google Ventures. In April 2025 the company added a name from the other side of the table - Gary Daniels, a former CEO of UnitedHealthcare - as Chief Growth Officer.
“The way health care is paid for makes just as much of a difference in patient outcomes as the clinical aspect itself.”
Chris Ellis · Insurance Leadership PodcastSix years old, and already suspicious of the system
Ellis was six when his father died of cancer. That is the fact under everything else. It pushed him first into cancer research, not into business - he wanted to fight the disease itself, and he started at MIT before working alongside oncologists to match patients to clinical trials. He has a theory about why healthcare has so few founders: people who revere a system rarely try to tear it apart.
His co-founder, Adam Stevenson, carried a near-identical wound - he too had lost a parent to cancer. Shared grief turned into shared mission. The two met largely through long emails about reimagining healthcare, then did the thing that sounds invented but is not: they took a trip into the Utah mountains to figure out what they were actually going to build.
I actually think we don't have as many entrepreneurs in healthcare today because how could you want to disrupt something you venerate?
Sometimes, having a bad experience early on opens up a window to question the things we take for granted.
A torn Achilles and a 3 a.m. phone call
The $20,000 surprise
While leaving his job to start Thatch, Ellis tore his Achilles tendon. After surgery, the insurer clawed back charges. He showed up for physical therapy and found himself staring at a roughly $20,000 bill and a closed door - a founder living the exact failure he was setting out to fix.
The call from the mountains
On a rare vacation with his newly retired mother, early employees texted that they could not fill prescriptions or see doctors. A coverage lapse. Ellis spent part of the trip on the phone with an insurer at 3 a.m., restoring benefits while fundraising and hiring and building all at once.
The Kaiser holdout
One early hire would accept only Kaiser, full stop. The plan the company had chosen did not fit, and there was no good way to bend it. Small frictions, repeated, that pointed at one answer: stop choosing for people.
The 20-year doctor
Another employee in New York opened the company plan and found it covered none of his physicians - including a primary care doctor he had seen for two decades. Group insurance, by design, cannot keep that relationship. Individual coverage can.
The unlikely resume
Ellis did not arrive at fintech in a straight line. He studied at Duke and MIT, started in cancer research, then hit a quiet realization on the bench - "I don't think I could do this for the rest of my life." He moved into health-tech commercial roles, building and running the sales team at SOPHiA GENETICS, selling clinical software to health systems, and spent time at biotech firm Agilent. The science taught him how care works. The selling taught him how money moves through it. Thatch needed both.
The other half of the equation was the team. Ellis and Stevenson recruited people who had built modern money tools - alumni of Stripe, Robinhood, Shopify, and Ramp - because they had concluded that health benefits were not really a healthcare problem. They were a financial-infrastructure problem wearing a healthcare costume.