Intron Healtha pioneering health technology company that provides clinical speech recognition for more than 200 accents spoken in developing countries, starting in Africa, has raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round.
The round was led by Microgravitywith participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jazz Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Angel graduateand Baker Bridge Capital. The investment also had contributions from angel investors from global companies including Google, CLEAR Global, NYUand Optum.
Details
With this funding, Intron Health will deepen its research efforts, enhance its cloud-native and on-prem capabilities, and expand distribution.
The company will also strengthen its team by recruiting technology talent to support product development and market expansion, driving continued progress and further breaking technological barriers.
Digging deeper
Voice technology has advanced rapidly worldwide and now plays a key role in a variety of industries – automating call center operations, creating social media content, biometric verification, voice bots for mental health and patient education, and eliminating hours of clinical documentation through ambient listening.
Productivity tools like clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are ubiquitous in developed markets.
However, with more than 3,000 of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and dialects in Africa, many African and minority languages and dialects remain excluded from global speech advancements. Intron Health’s advanced speech recognition platform bridges this gap by supporting a variety of African languages, accents, recognizing local names and accurately transcribing medical terminologies online and offline.
We not only improve efficiency, but also enhance health outcomes and positively impact hospital finances. Backed by significant global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, we look forward to the next phase of our growth.”
Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health
About Intron
Launched in 2020 to digitize healthcare, Intron founder, Tobi Olatunji, Data entry was quickly identified as a huge barrier to electronic medical record adoption. High patient traffic meant thousands of keystrokes a day, increasing documentation time and patient waiting time, with doctors sometimes spending more than six hours a day on paperwork. The significant additional workload made digitization impractical for already overworked clinicians.
To combat these inefficiencies, Intron developed Africa’s first clinical speech recognition platform, which boasts an accuracy rate of up to 92% on heavily accented medical terminology.
This platform helps doctors Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africaand more recently Uganda complete documentation seven times faster, significantly accelerating adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and reducing administrative burden.
What they say
Speaking of round, Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health stated, “Having worked as a doctor in Nigeria, I have experienced first-hand the pain points of trying to deliver quality healthcare in the midst of an increasing number of patients. We are thrilled with the adoption and growth we have seen over the past year, which shows that we are addressing an important need and providing a long overdue solution to a critical problem in the global south.
We not only improve efficiency, but also enhance health outcomes and positively impact hospital finances. Backed by significant global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, we look forward to the next phase of our growth.”
Dayo Koleowo, Partner at Microtractionshared, “We value companies and entrepreneurs who push boundaries with innovative solutions. Intron Health exemplifies this spirit. Tobi and Olakunle have effectively combined their domain expertise, unique insights and proven execution skills to achieve impressive traction. We are excited to further support Intron Health and are confident in their ability to deliver significant value to the healthcare sector and its stakeholders.”
Zoom out
At West Africa’s largest Hospital, the University of College Hospital, Ibadan, the company significantly reduced the workload of healthcare professionals, reducing radiology reporting time from 48 hours to just 20 minutes.
Speaking about the impact on operational efficiency and patient care, Mr Chief Resident in Radiology Department, Dr Oluwatosin Fatade, praised the technology’s ability to reduce multiple referral reviews, ultimately reducing patient wait times. “We confirmed that it was much better for us than the voice to text that was available on Android and iPhone. It is refreshing to finally see great technology helping doctors in the midst of many challenges facing healthcare in Nigeria“.
By The Numbers
Intron Health now serves over 30 public and private hospitals including Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) Kano, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Hospital (ABATH) Lagos, Babcock Teaching Hospital Ogun and Meridian Health Group Nairobi, providing care to more from 56,000 patients.
Because this matters
To solve the huge problem of different accents and languages, Intron Health created Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset, a proprietary set of more than 3.5 million audio clips across multiple specialties and domains, covering 288 tones from more than 18,000 contributors from 29 countries.
This massive data set allowed the company to train its algorithms for any hospital setting with minimal additional model refinement. Accessible via any device via a browser, Intron Health’s real-time AI speech-to-text transcription converts spoken information into text, allowing healthcare providers to easily enter data into electronic medical records, saving time and improving productivity.
How does it work
Leveraging the vast African base of data contributors, Intron Health has recently partnered Google researchThe Bill & Melinda Gates Foundationand Digital Square at PATH on the largest study of LLMs in global health evaluating 20+ LLMS (such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude) across 32 medical specialties in 15 countries.
The project, tagged AfriMed-QA, creates a pan-African multi-specialty reference dataset of 20,000 Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Short Answer Questions (SAQs) and Consumer Questions for Medical Question-Answers (QA). With input from more than 1,000 clinicians in 15 countries, this initiative will identify strengths, weaknesses and risks of bias or harm in LLMs and refine culturally adapted models for use in African clinics.
The company has also collaborated with industry leaders such as NVIDIA and Embraced face to enhance its technology.
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