The tale of how smart toilet startup Throne landed its seed round is so full of serendipities, one could almost believe it was orchestrated by the hand of Fortuna, Roman goddess of providence.
Throne is an Austin-based company working on an AI-powered toilet device for consumers. It uses computer vision (cameras pointing in the bowl plus AI software) to monitor gut health conditions. It just raised $4 million in seed financing led by Moxxie Ventures’ founder Katie Jacobs Stanton, with a bunch of other VCs participating and several famous angels like Lance Armstrong, Rupa Health co-founder Tara Viswanathan, and TrueMed founder Justin Mares (maker of brands like Kettle & Fire), the startup says.
Throne isn’t a toilet, but a device that mounts onto the bowl of one. The device, combined with software, analyzes indicators of certain chronic conditions, as well as hydration and urological function — all in the privacy of the home. The software has added privacy controls such as anonymizing the images sent to researchers.
The device is currently in a pre-production working prototype form, with a planned launch date of January, 2026, co-founder CEO Scott Hickle tells TechCrunch.
In addition to the seed funding, Throne also announced it hired John Capodilupo as its chief product officer. Capodilupo is best known as co-founder and former CTO of the WHOOP smartwatch device.
Throne started as a joke
The wild tale of how Hickle, a mechanical engineer, and Throne CTO Tim Blumberg, a full-stack software engineer, became smart toilet founders began in 2021 when they were playing poker with friends in Austin.
The players started riffing on startup ideas they’d like to do but wouldn’t want to be associated with. “And everyone’s pitching vice industry [ideas]; sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Tim said, ‘smart toilets.’ I was like, ‘That’s hilarious. Clearly, you would name that company Throne,’” Hickle recalled.
Fast-forward to 2023 when the nurse-hiring software startup Hickle and Blumberg were working on failed.
They had raised some funding for it and were calling their investors telling them they either needed a new idea or were going to return the funds. Out of the blue, one of their investors said, “You guys thought about smart toilets? We were like: You know, we’ve named that company! That’s Throne.”
They took that as a sign. The pair began researching and turned to Hickle’s mom, a doctor specializing in gerontology. He asked her if there would be any medical benefit in “looking at people’s waste” and she began regaling him with somewhat disgusting stories of the photos of such things that her patients loved to send her.
Short answer: yes. Waste can be analyzed for health-related information. They learned this could be helpful to monitor a wide variety of chronic conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), ulcerative colitis, detection of various colon cancers, chronic kidney disease, enlarged prostate, as well as conditions that could be identified or monitored by looking at other waste, such as menstrual blood.
As the son of two doctors (Hickle’s dad also dabbled in inventing medical devices), knowing it might be possible to divert a chronic condition attack, or predict a deadly cancer “was really motivating to me,” Hickle says.
Not everyone shared that enthusiasm. The co-founders knew they lacked hardware product development experience. One of their existing investors was so opposed to the idea, he wanted his money back. “That was brutal,” Hickle described, not just for the loss of capital but for the loss of confidence.
Still, after giving that money back, they ran into more people who liked the idea rather than who shunned them for it.
Standing outside Lance Armstrong’s bathroom door
Their Austin contacts led to an introduction to Lance Armstrong’s business manager, who set them up to pitch Armstrong directly. The former bike racer famously had testicular cancer.
And that led them to a “surreal” moment standing outside the racer’s bathroom door after having installed a prototype, waiting for his verdict, Hickle described. Armstrong wrote a check.
Not every introduction led to checks, but many led to more introductions, including to Capodilupo, who also wrote an angel check. Capodilupo had been public about suffering from ulcerative colitis and was on the board of trustees of Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. Capodilupo had the device manufacturing experience they needed. It took the founders months to convince Capodilupo to not just invest, but join as a founder.
The introduction to well-known seed investor Jacobs Stanton was also serendipitous. Hickle had been friends with Rupa Health’s Viswanathan since high school and she orchestrated the introduction.
More synchronicities landed them their partnerships with researchers at University of Washington and The University of Chicago, who are working to validate that the product’s software works as advertised. These partnerships are the key to its possible success. Throne landed University of Washington when a friend of Hickle’s randomly sat next to a urologist researcher on a plane and talked about Throne, then put him in touch, he said.
They got The University of Chicago when a friend of Hickle’s introduced him to his gastroenterologist uncle. The uncle happened to be one of the world’s premier gastroenterologist researchers who also sat on the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s board and knew Capodilupo.
With one fortuitous introduction after another, the inside joke among the founders is that “it’s better to be lucky than good, and we just get so dumb lucky. All the time,” Hickle said. But he also believes the tailwinds have been so strong, he feels like “the world wants us to do this.”
Other investors in the seed round include Accomplice, Long Journey Ventures, V1.VC, Night Capital, Retron VC, and Myelin Ventures.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the type of cancer Lance Armstrong had.
