Intron Health Raises $1.6 Million to Revolutionise Healthcare Transcription in Africa

Intron Health, a Nigerian AI startup, just raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding. Founded by Dr. Tobi Olatunji in 2020, the company provides speech-to-text transcription tools specifically for healthcare workers. With this new funding, Intron Health plans to hire more staff, enhance its research, and boost its cloud and on-premises capabilities.

Intron Health’s technology allows doctors to convert speech into text, making it easier to enter medical records. This is crucial in many African countries where doctors handle hundreds of patients daily and have overwhelming paperwork. The tool helps doctors quickly record patient information, write prescriptions, and generate reports using voice commands.

At the University College Hospital in Ibadan, Intron Health’s solution has reduced radiology report turnaround times from 48 hours to just 20 minutes. “We are improving efficiency, health outcomes, and positively impacting hospital finances,” said Olatunji.

One challenge for AI in Africa has been dealing with diverse accents, but Intron Health has addressed this by training its AI on over 3.5 million audio clips covering 288 African accents. This makes the tool highly accurate for a wide range of speech patterns.

The company is also developing a multilingual speech-to-text product to help doctors communicate with patients who don’t speak English, starting with an English-to-Hausa model.

Intron Health isn’t trying to outdo competitors like Helium Health and Terragon Health. Instead, it aims to collaborate by offering its speech-to-text technology to other electronic medical record systems.

Currently, Intron Health’s technology serves over 56,000 patients through partnerships with more than 30 hospitals in Nigeria and Kenya, including University College Hospital Ibadan, Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Babcock Teaching Hospital, and Meridian Health Group Nairobi.

The funding round was led by Microtraction and included investments from Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital.