Company leader
Robin Shah
Co-founder and Executive Chairman
Thyme Care
Robin Shah is co-founder of Thyme Care, a cancer care navigation company in Nashville, Tennessee, and executive chairman of its new parent company, Thyme Companies. Shah is trying to fill what he calls the care in between, the questions and problems that hit people with cancer between their appointments, a job he has worked on since helping his father keep a cancer practice open in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Saving a Cancer Practice in Gettysburg
In early 2007, while Shah was studying biomedical engineering at George Washington University, his father, an oncologist, visited him for lunch in Georgetown. His father had opened a cancer practice in their hometown of Gettysburg a year earlier, and the local hospital was trying to push him out by buying his competitors, cutting off referrals, and opening a practice across the street. He asked his son to help him fight. Shah turned down a job offer at the FDA and started commuting to Gettysburg every week while he finished his degree, he told Authority Magazine in 2022.
"I truly believe that the discussion with my father in 2007 was the catalyst of my career," he said. The company he later built describes him as having restructured the practice's business, brought in new technology, and helped build a research program there.
Early Days at Flatiron Health and OneOncology
Shah went on to Flatiron Health, an oncology technology company, where he was employee number three and later vice president of provider marketing and strategy. He was then a founding team member of OneOncology, according to a Heart of Healthcare podcast episode published in 2025.
A Phone Call That Led to Thyme Care
The idea for Thyme Care came from a call. His childhood best friend phoned to say his mother had been told she had pancreatic cancer and the first oncology appointment was four weeks away. Shah called people he knew, and she saw an oncologist within 48 hours. "I'm thankful I could help, but it was so disturbing to think that if they hadn't known me, my friend and his mother would have been stuck waiting for answers," he told Authority Magazine.
He found that colleagues in oncology got the same calls several times a month, and in 2020 he and Bobby Green, an oncologist, founded Thyme Care in Nashville to give people that kind of help through their health plan. Shah told the Nashville Technology Council that starting during the pandemic let the company recruit people from across the country and build quickly.
Building Thyme Companies
In July 2026 Shah handed the CEO job to Brad Diephuis and became executive chairman of Thyme Companies, a new parent company that will start other oncology businesses, beginning with work on the use of lower-cost biosimilar drugs and on clinical trial enrollment, CNBC reported. "When Bobby and I started this business six years ago, we had this vision that we needed to go after all the white spaces that were being constantly overlooked in oncology," he told CNBC. The move came alongside a $125 million Series E that valued Thyme Care at more than $2 billion.