Co-Founded By Former Whoop CTO, Throne Science Raises $10M To Track Gut Health From The Toilet

Throne Science, a startup that makes an AI-powered toilet camera to track gut health and hydration, has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Will Ventures, it told Crunchbase News exclusively.

Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice, Moxxie Ventures, and several other investors also participated in the financing. The round brings Throne’s total funding to nearly $18 million since its 2023 inception.

The startup was founded in 2023 by CEO Scott Hickle, who previously worked for nearly a decade in software product management at various companies, CTO Tim Blumberg, and former Whoop co-founder and CTO John Capodilupo, for whom the company’s mission is also a bit of a personal one as he has ulcerative colitis. 

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

Throne uses computer vision analysis to turn the raw camera data into health metrics. To achieve this, Hickle says the startup uses a pipeline of a dozen different computer vision models, some of which were trained by practicing gastroenterologists, to analyze various characteristics of stool and urine.

Connecting the dots

Earlier this month, Throne introduced a beta version of its Gut Health AI coach, which lets users ask questions about their data and receive personalized feedback. 

The tool uses LLMs to interview users after episodes of bad gut health to understand what the relevant factors underlying each episode might have been. 

“It’s a conversational AI experience very similar to speaking with a dietitian or nutritionist who might ask you about stress or changes in your diet or sleep,” Hickle said. 

Over time, as a member completes more of these journal entries, the AI gut health coach aims to identify what factors are most commonly associated with poor gut health, as well as which ones are most commonly associated with good days, according to Hickle.

“The coach connects the dots between someone’s diet, their lifestyle, and what’s actually happening in their gut, turning daily readings into insights they can use,” Hickle said. “This is where we think the long-term value lives, and it’s a meaningful differentiator.”

Capodilupo, who serves as Throne’s chief product officer, believes that longitudinal data “is the whole game.”

The magic at WHOOP was never any single measurement — it was watching the same person, day after day, year after year. That’s what makes a product feel like it actually knows you, and it’s also what pushes the science forward…,” he told Crunchbase News via email. “Gut health is even more underserved. There’s essentially no dense longitudinal dataset on human GI function, which is why so much of IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) care is still guesswork. Building one is as important to me as the product itself.”

Throne sells directly to consumers but is also exploring sales through clinicians, particularly functional-medicine practitioners. A third potential business line involves academic and pharmaceutical research. Studies of digestive health often depend on patients accurately describing and recording their own bathroom habits; Throne argues that its passive system could provide researchers with more consistent, objective data.

The device enters a market that includes Kohler, which recently introduced its Dekoda toilet-mounted health tracker. Hickle pointed to usability, battery performance and software as key differentiators between the two offerings. 

A ‘smoke detector for colon cancer’

Throne’s longer-term goal, according to Hickle, is to build an at-home system capable of identifying changes that could serve as early warning signs of colorectal cancer, as well as bladder and kidney cancers, kind of like a “smoke detector for colon cancer.”

That capability remains under development and is not a feature of the product now being sold.

For now, the technology behind Throne is showing clinical promise. The company was recently accepted to present its first academic abstract demonstrating that its visual AI assesses stool form with accuracy on par with board-certified gastroenterologists.

Validation studies with researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Chicago are also underway, according to the company.

Throne has recently added several executives and medical advisers, including gastroenterologists and colorectal-cancer experts Dr. Fola May and Dr. Aasma Shaukat, as it works to establish credibility in both consumer technology and gastrointestinal health. 

The next frontier in health monitoring

Will Ventures managing partner Ben Gardner said the opportunity reflects the broader adoption of passive health tracking pioneered by companies such as Whoop and Oura. He views passive digestive monitoring as the logical successor to wrist-worn wearables.

“Roughly 80% of consumers now adopt at least one gut-health targeting behavior, yet there is no existing medium for the continuous tracking of gut health markers,” Gardner wrote via email. 

“There is an immediate opportunity to build a premier gut health brand, and to make a real impact on public health along the way.”

Gardner also believes that the software-hardware integration gives Throne an edge in an emerging category. 

“Throne’s product is entirely non-invasive and relevant for everyone from GI patients to biohackers to general wellness seekers,” he said. “Longitudinal health data related to daily bathroom visits will be incredibly powerful, and it will be deeply enhanced by AI.”

Looking ahead, Throne plans to use the Series A capital to scale consumer education, expand clinical channels and advance core R&D.

“We’re creating a new category, so we’re investing heavily in educational content to help people understand why this matters,” Hickle said.

Though the company declined to disclose specific valuation or growth figures, Hickle expressed confidence in Throne’s market trajectory.

“We’re not sharing hard numbers at this stage, in part because this is a David-and-Goliath situation with a competitor like Kohler,” he said. “What I can say is that we’re following a trajectory similar to the wearable pioneers who came before us, like Whoop and Oura, giants on whose shoulders we stand.”

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Illustration: Dom Guzman