What does American Airlines ($AAL), State Farm ($PRIVATE:STATEFARM), Comcast ($CMCSA), and Lowe's ($LOW) all have in common? They all rely on Accolade for healthcare access and benefits, and this has empowered the former startup to become a publicly-traded company over the weekend.
While everyone took Thursday off for the long holiday weekend, Accolade was ringing in their public debut and new stock ticker symbol $ACCD. "We're changing the way healthcare works in this country," CEO Rajeev Singh said to a mostly empty Times Square, in a pre-recorded message. He said of the co-founders, Tom Spann and Michael Cline, that they "said aloud something that most people in this country wholeheartedly agree with: healthcare is fundamentally broken. What made them different, like all great entrepreneurs, is that they set out to do something about it."
The Seattle startup was founded in 2007 by Spann and Cline, and sought to use data-driven analytics, AI and machine learning, and cheaper costs to help usher in an era of "personalized healthcare advocacy." A group of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, agreed that this premise was the foundation of a good idea, and helped fund Accolade to the tune of $50 million in 2018.
Accolade would have filed for its IPO back in February, but the Coronavirus reared its ugly head and delayed everything. In the S-1 filing, the company said: "While the full effects of COVID-19 on the prospects of Accolade's business are not yet known, we do know that we have served as a critical resource to our members during this difficult time."
"We believe our value proposition now resonates with an even broader audience of employers as they turn their focus to safely reopening their workplaces and managing the ongoing health and well-being of employees and their families," the company added.
If you're interested in the stock, it might help to know Accolade has 58 corporate clients so far, and has 1.7 million members actively. As long as healthcare can be disrupted by innovative startups like Accolade, these numbers might continue to grow, and we'll continue tracking the data to find out what the future holds for the industry.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
