Throne Science raises $10 million for toilet-based gut-health tracking

Why it matters

Throne is using hardware to acquire a recurring stream of intimate health data, then monetizing the analysis through per-user subscriptions, AI coaching and potential clinical research channels.

Scott Hickle (@ScottHickle), John Capodilupo (@JohnCapodilupo) and Tim Blumberg (@Tim_Blumberg) have raised $10 million for Throne Science, their bet that the next valuable stream of personal health data will come from the toilet.

The Series A was led by Will Ventures, with Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice and Moxxie Ventures participating, Crunchbase News reported. Throne says the financing brings its total funding to nearly $18 million since its founding in 2023. The valuation was not reported.

Hickle and Blumberg first discussed smart toilets during an Austin poker game in 2021, when friends were pitching businesses they found too strange to build themselves. They returned to the idea in 2023 after a nurse-hiring software venture failed, according to TechCrunch. A conversation with Hickle's mother, a geriatrician, gave the founders a practical medical use case for the joke: waste data could be useful in patient care.

"We started Throne because we believe it's inevitable that people will one day measure their health from their waste," Hickle told Crunchbase News.

Capodilupo made that thesis personal. He dropped out of Harvard in 2012 to co-found Whoop, served as its CTO for a decade and was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2016. His experience included hospitalization and weight loss, according to Throne materials and a Crohn's & Colitis Foundation profile. Capodilupo initially invested in Throne before joining Hickle and Blumberg as a co-founder and chief product officer.

His move gave Throne an experienced consumer-hardware operator and a product thesis inherited from wearables: repeated measurements of one person can become more useful than any isolated reading. Capodilupo told Crunchbase News that dense longitudinal data is especially important in gut health because inflammatory bowel disease care still lacks that kind of continuous record.

The subscription behind the sensor

Throne One is a $399.99 sensor that clips to a toilet rim and points a camera and acoustic sensor into the bowl. Throne says computer vision analyzes stool form, frequency and other characteristics. Urine color and concentration generate a Hydration Score, while urinary-flow measurements track flow rate and timing. Hickle told Crunchbase News that Throne runs the data through roughly a dozen computer-vision models, some trained by practicing gastroenterologists.

The hardware is the entry point for a recurring software business. A Throne membership costs $5.99 per month or $70 annually, and each person using the device needs a separate account and subscription. One sensor can support as many as six users. Throne lists battery life at 25 or more days under typical use.

That per-user model matters. Throne can sell one device into a household and collect recurring revenue from several members, while each additional user contributes another longitudinal record. The arrangement also raises the bar for retention: the scores, trends and recommendations must remain useful after the novelty of installing a camera on a toilet wears off.

Throne added a beta Gut Health Coach in July. Users can record changes in diet, sleep, stress, travel and other factors, then let the AI compare those entries with their stool and hydration data. According to Throne, the coach can ask one or two follow-up questions and rank logged factors by how strongly they appear associated with changes in a user's Gut Health Score.

Throne says the coach is opt-in and sends journal entries, scores and chat data to third-party AI providers to generate responses. Throne also warns that those responses can be inaccurate and are intended for general wellness rather than medical decisions.

The feature reveals where Hickle and Capodilupo expect the lasting value to sit. A camera can classify what happened during a bathroom visit. A long-running software record can attempt to explain why it happened, giving users a reason to keep paying and giving Throne a dataset that conventional research, periodic laboratory tests and manual symptom diaries struggle to produce.

Medical ambition without medical clearance

Throne currently markets Throne One as a general wellness product. It has not been cleared or approved by the Food and Drug Administration and is not sold as a diagnostic device. Its available features cannot diagnose, treat or screen for disease.

Hickle's longer-term ambition goes further. He told Crunchbase News that Throne wants to develop an at-home early-warning system for colorectal, bladder and kidney cancers, describing the goal as a "smoke detector for colon cancer." That capability remains under development and is not included in the product consumers can buy.

Throne says its visual AI has been accepted for an academic presentation comparing its stool-form assessments with those of board-certified gastroenterologists. Throne also says validation work is underway with researchers at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago. Those studies are central to any move beyond wellness tracking. A large proprietary dataset can support research, but clinical claims require evidence that survives outside Throne's own models and marketing.

The Series A will fund research and development, consumer education and expansion through clinicians, according to Crunchbase News. Throne is particularly interested in functional-medicine practices and is exploring academic and pharmaceutical research, where passive measurements could reduce reliance on patients remembering and recording every bathroom visit.

Throne has to earn access to the bathroom

The toilet-based health-tracking category also includes Kohler, the kitchen-and-bath company. Kohler introduced its Dekoda toilet-mounted tracker in October 2025 at $599. Kohler says Dekoda tracks gut health and hydration and can detect blood in the toilet bowl. Hickle points to Throne's software, usability and battery performance as differentiators.

Kohler's presence changes the comparison: Throne One costs less upfront, while its membership creates an ongoing charge for each user.

Throne's privacy policy says the device captures video of toilet contents and audio of urinary flow. That data collection is central to the trust challenge in the category: the same records that could make passive gut-health tracking useful are also records most people have never collected at home.

Hickle, Capodilupo and Blumberg have raised enough capital to move Throne beyond an unusual hardware product and begin building clinical and research channels around that data. Their next test is whether consumers will keep the sensor installed long enough for its longitudinal thesis to work.