Intron Health has successfully secured $1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round. This round was led by Microtraction, with participation from a range of notable investors including Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, Baker Bridge Capital, and several angel investors.
The investment aims to support Intron Health’s mission to revolutionize healthcare in Africa by enhancing its speech recognition tool, specifically designed for African accents. The funds will be used to refine noise cancellation, optimize performance in low-bandwidth environments, enable multi-speaker transcription, and integrate text-to-speech capabilities. Additionally, Intron Health plans to develop intelligent systems for tasks like prescriptions and lab tests, ultimately reducing doctor errors and improving patient care.
Why Investors Invested
Investors were drawn to Intron Health due to several compelling factors:
- Market Gap: The lack of speech recognition tools effectively catering to minority languages and diverse accents, particularly in Africa, presented a significant market opportunity. Intron Health’s proprietary database, trained on 3.5 million audio clips from 18,000 healthcare professionals across 29 countries, ensures high accuracy in medical terminology and diverse African accents.
- Proven Traction: Intron Health’s existing adoption in 30 hospitals across five markets, including Kenya and Nigeria, showcased its viability and potential impact.
- Impactful Outcomes: Demonstrated successes, such as reducing radiology result waiting times, highlighted the technology’s potential to significantly improve healthcare efficiency. For example, the tool has cut radiology result waiting times from 48 hours to 20 minutes in one of West Africa’s largest hospitals. This efficiency is critical in regions with low doctor-to-patient ratios, making the technology highly valuable.
- Experienced Team: Tobi Olatunji’s background as a medical doctor and machine learning scientist, coupled with his experience at Enlitic and Amazon, instilled confidence in the startup’s leadership and technical capabilities.
- Growing Market & Existing Partnerships: The projected growth of the global speech and voice recognition market further solidified the investment’s potential returns. Furthermore, Intron Health’s partnerships with notable organizations like Google Research, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Digital Square at PATH highlight its commitment to advancing speech recognition research in Africa. These collaborations position Intron Health as a leader in creating culturally attuned models, which is crucial for ensuring the technology’s relevance and adoption in African healthcare systems.
A Look at Intron Health
Intron Health was founded in 2020 by Tobi Olatunji, a former medical doctor from Nigeria with extensive experience in medical informatics and computer science. The startup initially aimed to digitize hospital operations in Africa through an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system but pivoted to focus on speech recognition due to challenges with physician adoption of typing over writing. Their primary product is a speech-to-text tool that can accurately transcribe spoken language, including medical terminology, even in the presence of heavy accents or dialects.Beyond healthcare, Intron Health’s technology has the potential to improve communication and accessibility in various other sectors across Africa, where speech recognition can play a crucial role in bridging language barriers and empowering individuals.
Intron Health’s primary markets include Nigeria, Kenya, and other African countries where the need for efficient healthcare solutions is critical. The startup’s speech recognition tool, designed to recognize and accurately transcribe African accents, has been adopted in 30 hospitals across five markets.
Olatunji’s background includes training and practice as a medical doctor in Nigeria, followed by advanced degrees in medical informatics from the University of San Francisco and computer science from Georgia Tech. His professional experience includes roles at Enlitic and Amazon Web Services, where he specialized in natural language processing for healthcare applications.
Intron Health is also actively involved in speech research, partnering with global leaders to evaluate large language models and ensure they cater to African contexts. This research aims to address biases and enhance the applicability of these models in African healthcare settings.
By combining cutting-edge technology with a deep understanding of local healthcare needs, Intron Health is poised to revolutionize how medical professionals in Africa interact with technology, ultimately improving patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency.
