Intron Health, a pioneering tech startup, has secured $1.6 million in pre-seed funding to develop advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for global health challenges. The round was led by notable investors, reflecting growing confidence in AI’s potential to revolutionize healthcare, especially in under-resourced regions.
Founded to address the critical need for scalable and efficient healthcare solutions, Intron Health is leveraging AI to enhance clinical outcomes in diverse and multilingual settings. The company’s flagship product is an AI-powered speech-to-text transcription service designed to streamline the documentation process in hospitals.
Launched in 2020 to digitise healthcare, Intron Founder, Tobi Olatunji, quickly recognised data entry was a massive bottleneck to electronic medical record adoption. Heavy patient traffic meant thousands of keystrokes per day, increasing documentation time and patient wait time, with doctors sometimes spending over six hours a day on paperwork. The significant additional workload made digitization impractical for already overworked clinicians.
To combat these inefficiencies, Intron developed Africa’s first clinical speech recognition platform, which boasts up to 92% accuracy rate on medical terminology with heavy accents. This 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.
The tool converts spoken medical information into text in real-time, significantly reducing the time healthcare providers spend on data entry and allowing them to focus more on patient care. By automating clinical documentation through ambient listening, Intron Health is reducing the administrative burden on clinicians and enhancing the efficiency of healthcare delivery.
“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,” said Tobi Olatunji, Founder and CEO of Intron Health. “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.”
The funding round was spearheaded by Microtraction and saw contributions from several notable investors, including Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital. Additionally, angel investors from global companies such as Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum also participated.
A key differentiator for Intron Health is its extensive clinical speech dataset, the largest of its kind in Africa. This proprietary dataset includes over 3.5 million audio clips, covering 288 accents from 29 countries. Such diversity ensures the AI models can perform accurately across different dialects and languages, making it highly adaptable to various clinical environments with minimal additional training.
Intron Health’s success has attracted partnerships with industry leaders such as Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH. The company recently collaborated on the AfriMed-QA project, the largest study on large language models (LLMs) in global health, evaluating over 20 LLMs on 32 medical specialties across 15 countries. This initiative aims to create a pan-African multispecialty benchmark dataset to identify strengths, weaknesses, and risks of bias or harm in LLMs, and to fine-tune culturally attuned models for use in African clinics.
The AfriMed-QA project, supported by more than 1,000 clinicians from 15 countries, aims to fine-tune AI models to recognize and respond to the unique medical needs and cultural contexts of African populations. By identifying potential biases and areas for improvement, Intron Health ensures its AI solutions are both accurate and culturally sensitive.
Intron Health has also partnered with NVIDIA and Huggingface to further enhance its technology. As a member of the Commonwealth Artificial Intelligence Consortium (CAIC), Intron Health is extending cutting-edge AI technologies to Commonwealth Small States, showcasing the transformative power of localized voice technology beyond healthcare.
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