Thatch is a health benefits platform founded in 2021 by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson to help startups provide personalized healthcare to employees quickly and efficiently. The company faced challenges with integrating payroll systems to manage health benefits, which led them to partner with Finch, a unified employment API that streamlined the process of reading and writing employee data across over 200 HRIS and payroll systems. This collaboration allowed Thatch to save $800,000 in payroll costs, launch their product 10 months earlier than planned, and achieve a tenfold increase in revenue without the need for additional engineering staff. By offering a seamless user experience and the ability to provide employees with flexible healthcare budgets, Thatch enables small businesses to offer competitive health benefits akin to larger companies. The partnership with Finch also allowed them to offer unexpected value-added services, such as notifying employers when employees need to be offboarded from benefits. Chris Ellis emphasizes that payroll integration should not be a core competency for startups and likens Finch's role to that of Stripe for payments and Plaid for bank accounts.