Intron Health, a promising AI startup from Nigeria, has secured $1.6 million in pre-seed funding to enhance its speech-to-text transcription solutions for healthcare professionals. This significant investment will drive the company’s expansion, fund research, and boost its cloud-native and on-premise capabilities.
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health addresses a critical need in African healthcare systems, where doctors juggle extensive patient loads and substantial paperwork. By converting spoken words into text, Intron Health streamlines the documentation process, allowing medical professionals to record diagnoses and generate reports through voice commands.
The company’s innovation has notably accelerated radiology reporting at the University of College Hospital, Ibadan, slashing turnaround times from 48 hours to just 20 minutes. Dr. Olatunji emphasizes the impact of this technology: “We are enhancing efficiency and health outcomes while positively influencing hospital finances.”
Despite challenges related to data scarcity in Africa, Intron Health’s AI tool is adept at recognizing diverse African accents. Dr. Olatunji, with over a decade of experience in deep learning, reveals that their datasets encompass over 3.5 million audio clips across 288 accents. “Our algorithms are designed to adapt to both dominant and minority accents,” he explains.
Intron Health is also developing a multilingual version of its speech-to-text product to facilitate communication between doctors and patients who do not speak English. The initial rollout will feature an English-to-Hausa model in the coming months.
While competing with regional players like Helium Health and Terragon Health, Intron Health focuses on collaboration rather than competition. “We are not aiming to differentiate ourselves but to partner with others in the electronic medical record space,” says Dr. Olatunji. The company’s technology is already used across over 30 hospitals in Nigeria and Kenya, serving more than 56,000 patients.
The recent seed funding round was led by Microtraction and included contributions from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.