Clover Health will be getting a new CEO in the new year.
The insurtech company announced Monday that founder and current Chief Vivek Garipalli will transition out of the CEO position on Jan. 1 but will remain with Clover as its executive chairperson. Co-founder and President Andrew Toy will succeed him as CEO.
The two will work together closely over the course of the transition and will develop a long-term collaborative relationship to continue the push toward Clover's growth. Garipalli said in the press release announcing the changes that the move is the "culmination of a succession plan" that Clover developed when Toy joined the company as its chief technology officer.
“I've always believed the right long-term leader for Clover will have a technology-first mindset,” said Garipalli. “Andrew is a unique technologist and business strategist. He’s a true founder in every sense of the word. Having built companies from scratch, he has an abundance of grit needed to solve the hardest problems in healthcare.
"He has the fastest learning speed of anyone I've ever met, and I believe his transition to CEO will give Clover a strategic edge overnight that will only continue to pay dividends for our mission moving forward," Garipalli added.
Toy joined Clover in 2018 after a stint at Google, where he coordinated the Android team's enterprise activities and ran machine learning, enterprise search and analytics for the G-Suite. Prior to Google, Toy served as the CEO and co-founder of Divide, a company that aimed to build a split between work and personal data on mobile devices and was later acquired by Google.
Toy worked to launch Clover's Assistant platform and a new line of business for fee-for-service Medicare and was elevated to president in 2019.
The relationship between the CEO and executive chairperson will be "inherently symbiotic," Toy said in the release, and Garipalli will continue to play a key role at Clover.
“As a natural founder and entrepreneur, Vivek sees things nobody else sees, and his intuition is second to none. When he comes up with an idea, I immediately focus on making it happen because his predictions are so spot on. He has, time and again, made the impossible possible," Toy said. "While Vivek would no doubt continue to be an incredibly successful CEO of Clover for years to come, I know that his true passion is big picture strategy and the rapid, scrappy uncertainty that exists in the building stages of a company. In this more strategic role, he can continue to lean into his strengths and bring outsized value to Clover and to me as CEO."