HealthTech firm, Intron, raises $1.6m to boost speech recognition in Africa

Joy Agwunobi

Intron Health, a health tech company that  specialises in clinical speech recognition for over 200 accents spoken in developing countries, particularly in Africa, has successfully raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding. The financial boost is expected to enable the company to further develop and deploy its innovative speech recognition technology tailored to understand and interpret diverse African accents.

The pre-seed funding round drew notable investors who flocked to back the game-changing speech recognition venture. At the helm was Microtraction, with a healthy investment portfolio from the likes of Plug and Play Ventures, Jaza Rift Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenseedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni Angel, and Baker Bridge Capital. Angel investors from global companies such as Google, CLEAR Global, NYU, and Optum also contributed to the round.

In a statement, Intron Health outlined its plans for the newly acquired funds, highlighting that it intends to deepen its research efforts, enhance both cloud-native and on-premises capabilities, and expand distribution.

In addition, the company stated its plans to recruit tech talent to support product development and market expansion. The funding, according to Intron Health, will also be used to perfect noise cancellation technology, ensure platform functionality in low bandwidth environments, enable transcription of multi-speaker conversations, and integrate text-to-speech capabilities.

Intron Health, founded by Tobi Olatunji in 2020, revolutionised healthcare documentation with its innovative speech-to-text platform. This technology boasts a remarkable 92 percent accuracy rate in transcribing medical terms, even with heavy accents. Currently operational in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda, Intron Health’s platform empowers healthcare professionals to complete documentation seven times faster, significantly reducing administrative burdens.

Intron Health’s innovative technology addresses a critical issue in voice technology, particularly in Africa, where over 3,000 languages and dialects exist. This diversity has led to the exclusion of many African languages and accents from global speech advancements. However, Intron Health’s expansive clinical speech dataset of over 3.5 million audio clips from 29 countries provides a bridge, enabling the training of algorithms for deployment in hospitals with minimal fine-tuning.

Intron Health’s speech-to-text AI transcription platform is universally accessible through any browser-enabled device, converting spoken information into text with unprecedented speed and accuracy. This innovative technology not only improves the efficiency of healthcare providers in Africa but also has the potential to revolutionise localised voice technology applications on the continent and beyond. By bridging the gap between global speech advancements and Africa’s linguistic diversity, Intron Health is poised to make significant strides in the field of speech recognition, paving the way for broader adoption of AI-driven solutions tailored to local needs.

Tobi Olatunji, founder and CEO of Intron Health, noted that the platform goes beyond just enhancing efficiency, as it can have a direct, positive impact on health outcomes and hospital finances.

Olatunji expressed confidence in his company’s speech recognition technology, stating, ““Because we’ve already trained on many African accents, it’s very likely that the baseline performance of our access will be much better than any other service they use.”