Intron Health, a Nigerian AI company specializing in speech-to-text transcription tools for healthcare workers, has raised $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round. The startup plans to use the capital to hire more employees, deepen its research efforts, and enhance its cloud-native and on-prem capabilities.
Founded in 2020 by Dr. Tobi Olatunji, Intron Health addresses the significant paperwork burden faced by doctors in many African countries. By converting speech into text, their solution allows healthcare professionals to enter medical records, give prescriptions, and generate patient reports through voice commands. This efficiency improvement is crucial for doctors who attend to hundreds of patients daily.
Intron Health’s impact is evident in its success at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, where it reduced radiology reporting turnaround time from 48 hours to 20 minutes. “We are improving efficiency, health outcomes, and positively impacting hospital finances,” Olatunji told TechCabal.
The company’s AI transcription tool is designed to account for various African accents, with datasets trained on over 3.5 million audio clips across 288 African languages. Olatunji, who has over a decade of deep learning experience, explained, “We made algorithms that train how the model responds to dominant and minority accents.”
Intron Health is also developing a multilingual speech-to-text product to help doctors communicate with patients who don’t understand English, starting with an English-to-Hausa model set to deploy in the coming months.
Competing with Helium Health (Nigeria) and Terragon Health (Kenya), which provide Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) solutions, Intron Health aims to partner with rather than differentiate from its competitors. The company offers its speech-to-text recognition software to other EMR businesses.
Currently, Intron Health serves over 56,000 patients through partnerships with more than 30 public and private hospitals across Nigeria and Kenya, including the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital (AKTH) Kano, Babcock Teaching Hospital Ogun, and Meridian Health Group Nairobi.
The seed 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.
