"Whoop for Your Poop": How Throne Science Is Building the Future of Gut Health Monitoring
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We track our sleep. We track our heart rate, our glucose, our respiratory rate, our steps. We have rings and bands and watches that know more about our bodies than most doctors did a generation ago.
But nobody's been paying attention to what you leave behind in the toilet... until now.
Scott Hickle is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, a device that clips onto your toilet bowl and uses computer vision and AI to analyze your waste every single time you go. It tracks hydration, gut health, urinary flow, and bathroom habits automatically, hands-free, without you changing a single thing about your routine. Think of it as Whoop for your poop.
"We have 50 devices that track sleep and cardio and respiratory and metabolic health," Scott told the group. "Nothing looks at your gut health or urinary function on a daily basis, despite the fact that you go to the toilet multiple times a day. You're leaving the clues behind."
The Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
The market opportunity Scott is going after is staggering. 50 million Americans have a diagnosed urinary tract condition, with the most prevalent being benign prostatic hyperplasia, which affects half of men by age 50 and 80% by age 70. Another 60 million Americans have a chronic digestive disease. And then there's the statistic that stopped the room:
Colorectal cancer is now the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. It's the only cancer whose incidence is rising year over year. 150,000 Americans were diagnosed last year, and 50,000 died. But caught at stage one, it has a 91% five-year survival rate — and on average, there's a 7-to-10-year window to find polyps before they become malignant.
The challenge? Most people never get screened. Aetna sends out a million prophylactic fecal tests per year and sees a return rate of just 3-6%. People don't do the things their insurance company tells them to do.
That's where Throne comes in.
From Poker Game Joke to Real Company
Scott's path into Throne Science began at a poker game in 2021. His future co-founder Tim (who had just moved to Austin and happened to be the co-founder of Whoop) was riffing on startup ideas you'd love to build but wouldn't want your name on. Tim made the case, sincerely, that smart toilets were the real opportunity.
"I was like, that's brilliant," Scott recalled. "Clearly you name that company Throne and put a leaderboard on it. There's your go-to-market."
The idea sat as a running joke for a couple of years. Then in 2023, Scott and Tim called Scott's mom (a geriatrician in New Mexico) and asked her a simple question: is there any medical utility to paying attention to what's in the toilet bowl?
Forty-five minutes later, they had their answer. "In geriatrics, there's a joke that all old people talk about is their kids, their meds, and their poop," she told them. "It's so true that I don't give my phone number to my patients anymore because they'll send me so many pictures."
That call confirmed three things: people intuitively know there's health information in their waste, they desperately want to understand it, and there was no good tool to help them. Throne was no longer a joke.
Building It: Webcams, Gastroenterologists, and a Lot of Iteration
The first Throne prototype was a Raspberry Pi with a webcam in a 3D-printed housing, basically a Tupperware box with a button. Scott and Tim installed 30 of them in friends' homes around Austin, asking people to push the button every time they went. No app. No feedback. Just data collection.
Those 30 devices generated 5,000 images, which they paid gastroenterologists in Egypt and Pakistan $30 an hour to label — more than those doctors made seeing patients in a day.
From there, they iterated. The button-based device gave way to a battery-powered model with an app and Bluetooth connectivity. That device taught them another crucial lesson: asking someone to change even one thing about a bathroom routine they've had since they were two years old doesn't work. It had to be completely hands-free.
The current version clips onto any toilet, uses a motion sensor to wake up when you approach, identifies who you are via your phone's Bluetooth in about two seconds, and records automatically. When you walk away, it turns itself off. Everything syncs to the app.
What the App Actually Shows You
The Throne app gives you a gut health score and hydration score after every session, along with AI-generated insights and trend data over time. It also measures urinary flow rate; the peak flow value is the most clinically important marker for prostate health, and Throne captures it just from the sound of your urine.
Scott walked the group through his own data, pointing to a pattern he's now seen two years in a row: a dip in gut health scores every time fundraising season hits, followed by a dramatic improvement over Christmas when he's off work and eating home-cooked food.
"Stress is the number one thing that drives my gut health," he said. "And I know that because I can see it in the data."
The next layer being built is an AI gut health coach, which is something that will quiz you when you have a bad day ("Were you stressed? Did you travel? What did you eat in the last 24 hours?") and, over time, identify patterns specific to you. Not the average person in a clinical study. You.
Fundraising: The Actual Process
One of the most valuable parts of the conversation was Scott breaking down how Throne raised its seed round — $4 million at a $20 million valuation — in concrete, step-by-step detail.
The key insight: fundraising is a sequenced process, not a spray-and-pray effort.
Before you start, build two spreadsheets. One is every fund you'd want to talk to. The other is every founder friend or VC-adjacent contact you have. Go to all those people first, not for intros yet, just to ask: who are five people you can connect me to? Map your whole second-degree network before you fire a single email.
Then, the Thursday before you're ready to kick off your raise, have everyone send their intro emails simultaneously. That coordination creates momentum and signals that multiple credible people believe in you at the same time.
Another piece of advice Scott offered: raise less than you think you need. "If you start by saying you're raising $10 million and then the market tells you that's too much and you drop to $8 million, you spook people," he said. "But if you say you're raising $8 million and you get multiple term sheets, then you go back and ask if they'd be open to $9 or $10. Much easier."
Track everything in a spreadsheet or a CRM if you're already proficient in one. Status every contact. Treat it like pipeline management, because it is.
What's Coming Next
Throne 1 is a general wellness device. Throne 2 is intended to be medical.
The next device uses nine different wavelengths of light, including visible, infrared, and ultraviolet. This allows detection of the spectral fingerprint of hemoglobin, the component of blood that makes it red. In lab testing, the R&D imager can detect occult blood at concentrations 100,000 times lower than what the naked eye can see.
The goal: a device that flags microscopic blood in your waste, which is a potential early indicator of colorectal, bladder, kidney, or ureteral cancer. Every single time you use the toilet. Automatically. Without you doing anything differently.
To build toward that, Throne is pursuing three IRB-approved clinical validation studies: one on stool frequency with Dr. David Rubin (the most published GI researcher in the field), one on urinary flow metrics with a Stanford urologist, and one on hydration readings with UT Galveston.
Why This Moment
The Founders Only Club has always been about founders building in spaces that matter. Throne sits at a rare intersection: massive underserved markets, genuinely novel technology, a co-founding team with world-class hardware and consumer health experience, and a problem that touches nearly every person on the planet.
Scott's co-founder and CPO, John Capalupo, dropped out of Harvard to build Whoop, spent over a decade scaling it to a billion-dollar company, and joined Throne Science after a personal UC flare-up reminded him exactly why he cares about this problem.
That combination — relentless founders, a clear market, and deep personal conviction — is what we look for.
If you want to try Throne Science yourself, you can find them at thronescience.com and on social media at @thronescience.
This post is based on a live Founders Only Club session. You can find the full video in the member vault.