Nigerian healthtech startup, Intron Health secures $1.6 million in pre-seed funding to advance its AI technology, focusing on perfecting noise cancellation and handling multi-speaker conversations.
The funding round was led by Microtraction, with participation from Plug and Play Tech Center, Jaza Rift, Octopus Ventures, Africa Health Ventures, OpenSeedVC, Pi Campus, Alumni and Angels, and BakerBridge Capital. Global contributors included Google, ClEAR, NYU, and Optum.
Intron Health plans to use the funds to bolster its research efforts, enhance cloud-native and on-premises capabilities, and expand distribution. The startup aims to improve efficiency, enhance health outcomes, and positively impact hospital finances.
This move comes after the company developed its first clinical speech recognition service with a 92% accuracy rate on medical terminology even with heavy accents.
Launched in 2020 to digitise healthcare by reducing the heavy patient traffic and ensuring the smoothness of clinical inefficiencies, Intron Health claims it’s harnessing the power of localised voice technology to revolutionise healthcare and explore new applications across different sectors.
With its roots already in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda, it assists with Electronic Health Records (EHR) and reduces the documentation burden in clinical administration. However, many African languages and accents are still excluded from the service.
Hospitals Intron Health works with
The company offers services to over 30 public and private hospitals, including Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Bola Ahmed Tinubu Hospital, Babcock Teaching Hospital, and Meridian Healthcare Group in Nairobi. Through these partnerships, they are delivering care to over 56,000 patients.
Intron Health asserts to have created Africa’s largest clinical speech dataset, comprising over 3.5 million speech clips across multiple specialities and domains. This dataset covers over 200 accents from over 18,000 contributors in 29 countries.
Per the startup, it will streamline call centre operations, generate social media content, perform biometric verification, and provide voice tools for mental health and patient education. This will eliminate several hours of clinical documentation through ambient listening.
Read Also: Meta Removes Nigerian Profiles Linked to Catfishing and Scams
What’s more, Intron Health plans to roll out several tools, including clinical automatic speech recognition (ASR), that are common in developed markets.
