STRATEGY

Jesse Waldron

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.

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.

Helping cancer patients who could fall through the cracks.—CV

      

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LABOR MARKET

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If anyone decided to take Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” very, very literally, they’d be waking up right about now to find…a solid-ish job market.

Employers in the US announced 43,281 job cuts in September, about 18% down from the month before, according to an October 1 report from global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

That marked the seventh time in 2026 that job cuts were “lower than the corresponding month one year earlier,” the report noted.

September’s job cuts also marked a 20% dip from September 2025, and “the lowest total for the month since 2022.”

“Companies are in a wait-and-see period right now. Employers are facing high energy costs, an uncertain war in Iran, a rate hike that could make hiring more expensive, plus the [likelihood] of surging healthcare costs,” Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement. “We’ve seen layoff activity subside over this year, and September continues to illustrate this point.”

Tech still leads all industries in layoffs.—NP

      

AI IMPLEMENTATION

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Is there a way to keep data constantly AI-ready—even when the next AI trend is largely unknown?

Ramon Thomas, a strategic advisor at IT services and consulting company World Wide Technology, told IT Brew that “data is the crux of all AI initiatives,” while acknowledging that many organizations have historically struggled with data quality in general.

Poor data quality can lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” situation where poorly structured, undefined data ingested by an AI model leads to poor results, according to Thomas.

According to a 2026 Cloudera report, only 7% of respondents (which included people involved in their organization’s data decisions, and whose organizations were actively exploring, testing, or running AI projects) said their organization’s data is completely ready for AI adoption. Over a quarter (27%) of those surveyed said their data is either not very or not at all ready.

Eryn Brodsky, practice lead for servers, storage, and platforms within the hybrid infrastructure organization at CDW, said that while certain industries like finance and healthcare are ahead on the data maturity and quality curve, she estimated that the “majority of people” are unsure what the breadth of their data looks like or where it’s stored.

There are seven different phases for being “properly prepared” for AI utilization, IT Brew reports.—CN

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: $1.7 billion. That’s how much S&P 500 companies handed out in “special executive awards” last year—up 50% over 2024. (Wall Street Journal)

Quote: “This is arguably the hottest skill on Wall Street…They need people who understand data and people who understand AI and where to put it.”—Vijay Swaminathan, CEO of talent analysis platform Draup, on “agent orchestration” (CNBC)

Read: A federal ban on products containing hemp-derived THC could shutter a $28.3 billion industry. (AP)

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