Olive sees high-level staff departures

Olive is losing some of its top talent, three sources familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: Valued at $4 billion by leading firms including Tiger Global and General Catalyst, Olive is the venture darling of health care automation — a process intended to cut costs and put more resources toward patient care.

Where it stands: After hiring aggressively — growing its employee base roughly 340% between 2020 and February 2022, according to LinkedIn data — Olive froze hiring in March because of issues maintaining its budget, three people tell Axios.

By the numbers: Within roughly the last month, at least 20 employees have left the company, according to those people and LinkedIn data, including its:

• Executive vice president and general manager.
• Senior director of partner programs for analytics and operations.
• Director of data engineering.
• Chief marketing officer.
• Vice president of product.
• Engineering manager, two strategic account leads, partnerships program lead, strategic account executive, senior product manager, product manager, product manager of revenue cycle, revenue operations analyst, product owner, financial analyst, two software engineering team leads, software engineer and data scientist.
• "It's an exodus," one current employee tells Axios.

What they're saying: "People here walk around like we’re immune to these market dynamics," another current employee tells Axios. "And we aren't. We’ve bought into our own hype."

• In response to a summary of this story, an Olive spokesperson said the company "did not freeze hiring in March, and in fact hired more than 50 Olivians during the month" and added that it was "proud to employ more than 1,300 talented and passionate people, with over 250 hired since the start of 2022."

Flashback: Earlier this month, Axios published an investigation alleging the company's promises to save health systems millions of dollars with its automation software don't deliver.