Rick Bates

Founder and CEO RxSense

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Rick Bates is the founder and chief executive of RxSense, a Boston healthcare technology company that sits on both sides of the U.S. prescription drug market. Its enterprise business provides pharmacy benefits administration technology to PBMs, health plans, health systems and employers; its consumer business runs the SingleCare and FamilyWize prescription savings brands, backed by direct contracts with the country’s largest pharmacy chains. Bates founded the company in 2015, brought in private equity firm Parthenon Capital as an investor in 2020, and in December 2025 opened its first European office, in Dublin.

Career Highlights

• Founded RxSense in 2015, pairing pharmacy benefit management veterans with a technology team to rebuild pharmacy benefits administration.
• Built the RxAgile cloud platform for pharmacy benefits alongside the SingleCare and FamilyWize consumer savings brands.
• Secured a significant investment from Parthenon Capital in May 2020, adding Booking Holdings chairman Jeffery Boyd and Great Hill Partners co-founder John Hayes to the board.
• Opened RxSense’s first European office in Dublin in December 2025, announcing plans for 75 engineering and product roles over two years.

Professional Journey

Bates founded RxSense in 2015, according to the company’s 2020 investment announcement, “with a mission to develop technology solutions that improve healthcare transparency and access to more affordable medications.” The thesis was that pharmacy benefits administration ran on antiquated systems: he assembled people who knew the PBM industry’s problems from the inside and set them alongside an engineering team to build a new architecture for it.

The business that resulted has two halves. The enterprise side, built around the RxAgile platform, sells pharmacy benefits management technology to PBMs, health plans, health systems and employers. The consumer side uses the same platform, plus direct contracts with the largest U.S. pharmacies, to run the SingleCare and FamilyWize prescription savings services, which in 2020 the company said covered about 95% of the pharmacies where Americans fill prescriptions. The two halves reinforce one another: pricing data and pharmacy relationships gathered for one feed the other.

In May 2020 Parthenon Capital, a growth-focused private equity firm, made a significant investment in the company, at which point Bates was described as chairman and CEO. The deal brought two notable directors: Jeffery Boyd, chairman and former chief executive of Booking Holdings, who had earlier been an executive vice president at Oxford Health Plans, and John Hayes, co-founder of Great Hill Partners. Bates said the aim was to keep developing “solutions that meaningfully improve healthcare transparency and the affordability of prescriptions.”

In December 2025 RxSense announced its first office outside the United States, in Dublin, with plans for 75 full-time engineering and product roles over two years. Bates explained the choice as a talent decision: “Dublin offers that in abundance, it’s talent-dense, innovation-driven and culturally in sync with our US roots.”

His career before RxSense could not be established from a primary or dated source.

Education

No education record was found in a primary or dated source.