Canary Speech Raises $13 Million Series A Investment
Provo, Utah, June 13, 2024
Canary Speech has raised a $13 million Series A funding round led by Cortes Capital (Oklahoma City, formerly known as Love's Private Equity), with participation from new investors Sorenson Communications (Taylorsville, UT), SMK (Tokyo, Japan), and Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, NJ).
Canary's nine issued patents protecting the use of vocal biomarkers in healthcare places the company in a favorable position to accelerate advancements in artificial intelligence to meet the healthcare industry's demand for more advanced tools.
Canary's vocal biomarker technology has a wide range of applications within the healthcare industry. These applications include contact centers, ambient clinical listening, remote patient monitoring, and annual wellness checks. Ambient listening tools, which are systems designed to unobtrusively capture and analyze conversations in real-time, enable healthcare providers to focus on patient interactions while automatically documenting clinical notes.
"There are technologies that truly disrupt the way healthcare is administered, and Canary is committed to pioneering vocal biomarkers and ambient listening for the betterment of healthcare," said Henry O'Connell, co-founder and CEO of Canary Speech.
According to Healthcare IT Today, as many as 85 percent of physicians may adopt ambient listening tools. Canary's vocal biomarker technology enhances these tools by adding real-time screening for behavioral and cognitive conditions, providing clinicians with critical additional data that was previously unavailable. Through an extensive network of partnerships, both with telehealth organizations and health systems, Canary is poised to rapidly scale its cloud-based data processing capabilities.
"We couldn't be more excited to support Canary Speech's mission to drive change in the healthcare industry with their scalable technology and best-in-class team," said Ryan Tidwell, Chief Investment Officer at Cortes Capital.
The American Medical Association (AMA) reports that at the end of 2021, nearly 63 percent of physicians experienced symptoms of burnout, an increase from 38 percent in 2020. Through ambient listening, Canary can assess patients' health and simultaneously evaluate physicians' health, allowing healthcare systems to proactively support their care teams.
Headquartered in Provo, UT, Canary Speech is an AI-powered developer of a speech recognition technology designed to detect neurological and cognitive diseases. Canary Speech's technology monitors speech irregularities for early signs of various neurological conditions such as Parkinson's, dementia and Alzheimer's. It analyzes the neurological conditions of the patients, enabling the identification of early warning and early diagnosis of diseases that affect their cognitive functions.