There are few professional services startups out there that have managed to get investors as excited as Accolade Inc. The Seattle-based outfit raised a hefty $70 million in funding today from a group of high-profile backers led by Andreessen Horowitz to fuel the growth of its healthcare consulting operations.

Accolade employs several hundred medical professionals, analysts and support specialists who help organizations provide better insurance coverage for their personnel. The startup’s day-to-day activities consist mostly of assisting individual staffers with making the most out of their plans. This includes identifying when a worker isn’t taking advantage of certain benefits, finding the best treatment option for every given condition and handling the various administrative tasks involved in the task. The startup’s representatives can even offer health advise under certain circumstances.

In one of the client success stories posted on its site, Accolade details how its staff helped a Comcast Corp. worker identified as “Jerry” go through cancer treatment. Its representatives provided information on what he should expect in the hospital and how to make the subsequent recovery process as smooth as possible. The startup claims that this hands-on assistance has helped its corporate clients increase employee satisfaction with healthcare plans to as much as 98 percent while reducing both ER visits and prescription refills. The end result is that organization-wide insurance expenses are cut by 5 to 15 percent on average.

Accolade’s testimonials page currently only includes stories from Comcast and subsidiary NBCUniversal, but its customer base is poised to grow significantly in the wake of today’s investment. The startup will use the funds to step up marketing efforts and enhance its product lineup, which presently consists mainly of a web portal and mobile apps for contacting support staff.

Some of the funds will presumably also be used to enhance the internal analytics infrastructure that Accolade uses to produce optimization recommendations for its corporate clients. Seeing how  technology is now at a point where artificial intelligence software can be used to diagnose cancer, there are no shortage of opportunities for the startup to provide value-added services.

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