Intron Health secures $1.6m to boost African speech recognition

Intron Health, a health tech company on clinical speech recognition for African accents, has raised $1.6m in a pre-seed funding round.

The firm, in a statement made available to The PUNCH, said the funding round was led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.

The company added that angel investors from global companies like Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum also contributed.

It added that the raised funds would be used to deepen the company’s research, strengthen both cloud-native and on-prem capabilities, and expand distribution while planning to recruit tech talent to support product development and market expansion.

According to the firm, many African languages and accents have been excluded from global speech advancements adding that the company’s platform addresses this gap by supporting a range of African languages and accents.

The founder of Intron Health, Tobi Olatunji, identified data entry as a bottleneck to electronic medical record adoption.

 According to Olatunji, the platform, which was launched in 2020, helps doctors to complete documentation seven times faster, accelerating the adoption of electronic health records.

 “Having worked as a doctor in Nigeria, I have experienced first-hand the pain points of trying to deliver quality healthcare amidst increasing patient numbers,” he noted.

 A Chief Resident at the Radiology Department in Intron Health, Oluwatosin Fatade, praised the technology for its efficiency, stating, “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.”

 Intron Health now serves over 30 public and private hospitals, providing care to more than 56,000 patients across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda.

 Also, a partner at Microtraction, Dayo Koleowo, added, “We value companies and entrepreneurs who push boundaries with innovative solutions. Intron Health exemplifies this spirit.”

The firm further stated that it recently partnered with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH on a large-scale study evaluating language models in global health.

“This project, tagged AfriMed-QA, aims to identify strengths and weaknesses in language models,” it was said.