Throne Science funding hits nearly $18M after $10M Series A

Throne Science funding has reached nearly $18 million after the startup raised a $10 million Series A round led by Will Ventures, the company told Crunchbase News. For retail investors watching private health tech, the deal is another sign that venture money is moving beyond wrist wearables and into passive, at-home health tracking.

Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice, Moxxie Ventures and other investors also joined the financing. The company did not disclose a valuation or specific growth figures.

Throne was founded in 2023 by CEO Scott Hickle, who previously spent nearly 10 years in software product management, and John Capodilupo, a former Whoop co-founder and chief technology officer. Capodilupo, now Throne’s chief product officer, has ulcerative colitis, giving the company’s work a personal connection for him, according to Crunchbase News.

What does Throne Science do?

Throne makes a toilet-mounted camera that uses artificial intelligence to track gut health and hydration from stool and urine data. Computer vision, a type of AI that analyzes images, turns camera readings into health metrics.

Hickle told Crunchbase News that Throne uses a pipeline of about a dozen computer vision models, with some trained by practicing gastroenterologists, to assess characteristics of stool and urine. Gastroenterologists are doctors who specialize in the digestive system.

The company also recently launched a beta version of its Gut Health AI coach. According to Hickle, the tool lets users ask questions about their own data and uses large language models, or AI systems trained to understand and generate text, to ask follow-up questions after poor gut-health episodes about possible factors such as stress, diet or sleep.

Hickle said the goal is to connect users’ daily readings with patterns in their diet and lifestyle. Capodilupo told Crunchbase News by email that repeated measurements over time are central to the product, comparing the idea to Whoop’s use of long-term personal data. He said gut health lacks a dense longitudinal dataset, which means a dataset that follows the same person over many measurements.

How could Throne make money?

Throne currently sells directly to consumers, according to Crunchbase News. The company is also looking at clinician sales, especially through functional-medicine practitioners, and sees another possible business line in academic and pharmaceutical research.

The research pitch is straightforward: digestive-health studies often rely on people recording and describing bathroom habits themselves. Throne argues that a passive device could give researchers more consistent data.

The market is already drawing larger competitors. Kohler recently introduced Dekoda, a toilet-mounted health tracker. Hickle pointed to usability, battery performance and software as areas where Throne aims to stand apart.

Throne’s longer-term ambition is to develop an at-home system that could flag changes tied to possible early warning signs for colorectal, bladder and kidney cancers, Hickle told Crunchbase News. That capability is still being developed and is not part of the product now on sale.

The company was recently accepted to present its first academic abstract showing that its visual AI evaluates stool form with accuracy comparable to board-certified gastroenterologists, according to Crunchbase News. Throne also said validation studies are underway with researchers at Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Chicago.

Will Ventures managing partner Ben Gardner said in an email to Crunchbase News that passive digestive monitoring follows the broader shift toward health tracking popularized by companies such as Whoop and Oura. Throne plans to use the new capital for consumer education, clinical channels and research and development, according to Hickle.

This story draws on original reporting from Crunchbase News.