AFRICA – Intron Health, an innovative clinical speech recognition startup, has secured US$1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round to advance its cutting-edge speech recognition technology, which supports over 200 African accents.
Microtraction led the funding round, which included contributions from notable investors such as Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.
Additionally, angel investors from global giants like Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum also participated.
This significant financial boost will enable Intron Health to deepen its research, enhance its cloud-native and on-premises capabilities, and expand its distribution network.
Furthermore, the company plans to recruit tech talent to support product development and market expansion, driving continued progress and breaking new technological barriers.
Founded in 2020, Intron Health was established with the mission to digitize healthcare.
Early on, the company identified data entry as a massive bottleneck to the adoption of electronic medical records (EMR), with doctors often spending over six hours daily on paperwork. This additional workload made digitization impractical for already overworked clinicians.
Voice technology, which has rapidly advanced globally, plays a pivotal role in various industries. It is used to automate call center operations, biometric verification, and voice bots for mental health and patient education, as well as reduce several hours of clinical documentation through ambient listening.
Intron Health’s advanced speech recognition platform bridges this gap by supporting a diverse range of African languages and accents, recognizing local names, and accurately transcribing medical terminologies both online and offline.
Intron Health has amassed Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset, a proprietary collection of over 3.5 million audio clips across multiple specialties and domains.
This dataset, covering 288 accents from over 18,000 contributors in 29 countries, enables the company to train its algorithms for deployment in any hospital with minimal additional model fine-tuning.
The company’s speech-to-text real-time AI transcription converts spoken information into text, allowing healthcare providers to easily enter data into EMRs, saving time and improving productivity.
This platform has helped doctors across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and, most recently, Uganda complete documentation seven times faster, significantly accelerating the adoption of EMRs and reducing the administrative burden.
Remarkably, Intron Health alleviated the workload of healthcare practitioners at West Africa’s largest hospital, the University College Hospital in Ibadan, reducing radiology reporting turnaround time from 48 hours to just 20 minutes.
Currently, Intron Health serves over 30 public and private hospitals, including Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) in Kano, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Hospital (ABATH) in Lagos, Babcock Teaching Hospital in Ogun, and Meridian Health Group in Nairobi, providing care to more than 56,000 patients.
In collaboration with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH, Intron Health is leveraging its extensive African data contributor base for the largest study on large language models (LLMs) in global health.
This study evaluates over 20 LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, across 32 medical specialties in 15 countries.
Reflecting on the funding round, Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health, shared his first-hand experience as a doctor in Nigeria, emphasizing the challenges of delivering quality healthcare amidst increasing patient numbers.
He expressed excitement about the adoption and growth seen over the past year, indicating that they are addressing a significant need and providing a long-overdue solution to a critical problem in the global south.
Olatunji highlighted that their efforts are improving efficiency and health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances. With the backing of prominent global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, they look forward to their next growth phase.
Dr. Oluwatosin Fatade, Chief Resident at the Radiology Department, commended the technology’s ability to reduce multiple report reviews, ultimately cutting patient wait time.
He noted, “We confirmed it was much better for us than voice-to-text available on Android and iPhones. It is refreshing to finally see great technology that helps doctors amidst several challenges facing healthcare in Nigeria.”
Dayo Koleowo, Partner at Microtraction, emphasized their commitment to supporting companies and entrepreneurs who push boundaries with innovative solutions.
He praised Tobi and Olakunle for combining their domain expertise, unique insights, and proven execution skills to achieve impressive traction.
Koleowo expressed confidence in Intron Health’s ability to deliver significant value to the healthcare sector and its stakeholders.
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