Maria Thomas

About

Maria Thomas is a public and private company board member, CEO, and qualified financial expert who has spent 25 years building category-defining companies and trusted brands across consumer technology, e-commerce, media, and healthcare and over a dozen years serving on boards. Her career has followed a consistent through line: identifying markets at an inflection point, building the foundations to capture them, and leading teams through growth and transformation. That through line runs from Amazon's earliest years through Etsy, NPR Digital, and SmartThings — and into healthcare. At Amazon, Maria helped build and launch the consumer electronics vertical. As Etsy's first non-founder CEO, she led the company through extraordinary expansion, a tenfold increase in gross merchandise volume, while reaching profitability and balancing community values with operational rigor. At SmartThings, she was part of the founding executive team, scaling the company from Kickstarter launch to acquisition by Samsung in two years. In 2019, Maria pivoted toward healthcare, motivated by the unmet needs of aging populations and the absence of modern, preventive care models. As an EIR at Redesign Health, she helped conceive and launch DUOS, an AI-powered platform that helps health plans improve member outcomes by guiding Medicare Advantage, Medicaid, and ACA beneficiaries through their coverage and care. DUOS secured a $130M strategic growth investment in 2025. She is currently co-founder and CEO of Sunday Health, a preventive cognitive health company integrating clinical care and data science to deliver proactive, personalized brain health plans designed to prevent and delay cognitive decline. As a board director, Maria brings something that is genuinely difficult to replicate: a pattern-recognition perspective forged across multiple industries and business models. Having led companies through platform creation, digital transformation, and disruptive market entry, she brings boards a strategic lens that is both broad and grounded in operating reality. She is a seasoned independent director who knows how to ask the questions that matter, on strategy, risk, talent, and capital allocation, and how to support management teams without overstepping. Maria's financial fluency is deep and credentialed. She began her career on Wall St, later served as an investment officer at the International Finance Corporation (World Bank Group), holds an undergraduate degree in accounting, and passed the CPA exam. She qualifies as a financial expert and has served on audit committees.

Experience

Education