NAIROBI, Kenya- Nigerian startup Intron Health has secured $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round.
Led by Microtraction, this round saw participation from several prestigious investors including Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, and Octopus Ventures, alongside notable angel investors from global companies such as Google and NYU.
Intron Health, founded by Tobi Olatunji in 2020, is set to utilize this funding to enhance its research capabilities, strengthen both cloud-native and on-premises solutions, and widen its distribution network.
The company aims to bolster its team with top tech talent to support product development and market expansion, driving further technological advancements.
“Our mission is not only to improve efficiency but also to enhance health outcomes and positively impact hospital finances,” said Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health. “With the backing of prominent global investors, we are excited about our next phase of growth.”
Intron Health has pioneered Africa’s first clinical speech recognition platform, boasting an impressive 92pc accuracy rate on medical terminology with heavy accents.
This technology allows healthcare professionals in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda to digitize medical records by converting speech into text, accelerating the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) and significantly reducing administrative burdens.
The startup’s innovative platform supports a diverse range of African languages and accents, recognizing local names and accurately transcribing medical terms both online and offline.
This is made possible through Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset, comprising over 3.5 million audio clips across 288 accents from 29 countries, enabling the algorithms to function with minimal additional model fine-tuning in any hospital setting.
Voice technology has seen rapid global advancement, becoming integral in various industries.
However, many African and minority languages remain excluded from these developments. Intron Health’s speech recognition platform is bridging this gap, demonstrating transformative potential beyond healthcare.
The company is keen to explore further use cases for localized voice technology within and beyond the African continent.
Accessible via any device through a browser, Intron Health’s real-time AI transcription converts spoken information into text, allowing healthcare providers to efficiently enter data into electronic medical records, saving time, and boosting productivity.
