Nigeria’s Intron Health, an AI clinical speech recognition startup identifying over 200 accents spoken in Nigeria and across its markets in Africa, has raised $1.6M in a pre-seed funding round to deepen its efforts on clinical AI.
Intron Health’s speech-to-text real-time AI transcription converts spoken information into text allowing healthcare providers to easily enter data into electronic medical records, saving time and improving productivity. With he cash, it aims to recruit more tech talent for product development and market expansion, drive continued progress and break further technological barriers.
The 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 investment also saw contributions from angel investors from global companies, including Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum.
According to Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health, “Having worked as a doctor in Nigeria, I have experienced first-hand the pain points with trying to deliver quality healthcare amidst increasing patient numbers. We are excited about the adoption and growth we’ve seen over the past year, which shows we are addressing a significant need and providing a well overdue solution to a critical problem in the global south.”
Founded in 2020 by Olatunji, Intron Health is not only improving efficiency but also enhancing health outcomes and positively impacting hospital finances. Intron Health’s clinical speech recognition platform helps doctors across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and most recently Uganda complete documentation seven times faster, significantly accelerating the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and reducing the administrative burden.
“With the backing of prominent global investors who bring deep knowledge and expertise, we are looking forward to our next phase of growth,” said Olatunji, who saw the dangers of poor record keeping and lack of electronic medical records in various hospitals.
Clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR) are ubiquitous in developed markets. However, with over 3,000 of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages and dialects in Africa, many African and minority languages and accents remain excluded from global speech advancements. Intron Health aims to bridge that gap by supporting a diverse range of African languages, accents, recognising local names and accurately transcribing medical terminologies online and offline.
Intron Health says it has created a clinical speech dataset with over 3.5 million audio clips across multiple specialties and domains, covering 288 accents from over 18,000 contributors from 29 countries to fine-tune its AI modules. Intron Health has signed up 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 than 56,000 patients.
“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,” said Dr Oluwatosin Fatade, the Chief Resident at the Radiology Department, West Africa’s largest Hospital, the University of College Hospital, Ibadan, which reduced radiology reporting turnaround time from 48 hours to just 20 minutes.
Intron Health recently partnered with Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH on the largest study on LLMs in Global health evaluating 20+ LLMS (like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude) on 32 medical specialties across 15 countries. The project, tagged AfriMed-QA, creates a pan-African dataset of 20,000 Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), Short Answer Questions (SAQs) and Consumer Questions for Medical Question-Answering (QA) contributed by over 1,000 clinicians across 15 countries.
NVIDIA and Huggingface are also some of its partners. As a member of the Commonwealth Artificial Intelligence Consortium (CAIC) initiated by the Commonwealth Secretary General, Rt Hon Patricia Scotland KC, Intron will help extend cutting-edge AI technologies to Commonwealth Small States.
Dayo Koleowo, Partner at Microtraction, shared, “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 support Intron Health further and confident in their ability to deliver significant value to the healthcare sector and its stakeholders.”
