Throne Science launches ThroneOne: AI-powered toilet health tracker targeting gut, urinary, and early cancer detection

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Scott, how you doing?

What's going on?

Fantastic. How's it going, gentlemen?

It's going fantastically over here, too.

Uh, it's great to see you here. Are we up in the corner?

You got a you got an interesting uh

What's What's that?

It's our logo. I don't know. It's uh I think

No, I was just saying cuz it's like you're looking It looks like you're looking at me. Oh yeah, I have my screen up here.

Okay. Okay. Well, first time on the show. Please introduce yourself.

Come over here. Hang out.

Uh we can that's that's better. That's better.

Okay. Uh please introduce yourself and the company.

I'm Scott, co-founder and CEO of Throne Science. We're building the first device to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health hands-free automatically every time you go to the bathroom. So people like to analogize us. We are whoop your poop oraura for your flora.

Uh very very cool and yeah just uh first time on the show somehow

is it all direct to consumer or is there pay with your insurance? How how does all of that work?

Yeah, great question. So we're launching today direct to consumer. We are HSA, FSA eligible

and we do have a longer term insurance B2B roadmap but

uh kind of the the thinking there is it's really hard to build a B2B company that ever succeeds B TOC.

Yep.

Whereas if you build a consumer brand the people you're ultimately selling into are people

are aware.

Talk about talk about the journey to get here. I know has it been two years at this point? It it's uh you guys have been grinding away

uh and it's awesome to finally get to launch.

I appreciate it, man. It's been almost 3 years.

Uh so we originally pivoted. We were started in nurse staffing and then as soon as co ended that was a terrible business to be in. So we decided uh let's go back to the drawing board. Both my parents are doctors. My dad's a medical device inventor. My co-founder Tim, he comes from a healthcare family. So we converged on healthcare as a interest area for us. and he had been thinking about smart toilets in the abstract since college. This is like, you know, this is a sci-fi inevitable future. Uh, and we called my mom one day and asked her, she's a geriatrician, was like, "Mom, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waste?" And she goes, "Honey, there's a joke in the field of geriatrics that all old people talk about is their kids, their meds, and their poop." And it's so true that I no longer give my phone number to my patients because they send me so many pictures of their poop.

Wow. And Tim and I walked away from that conversation like, "Wow, that's crazy, but also really interesting because it means that people intuitively appreciate that there's health information in their waist."

And B, it's so common that it changed the way my mom as a physician communicates with her patients as a blanket policy.

And so we started doing a bunch of homework and just kind of, you know, arrived at this perspective on the world that is you have continuous monitoring on every other category of your health, right? Your sleep, your cardio, your respiratory, your metabolic health. nothing looking at your GI or urinary health despite the fact that two and three Americans who have been surveyed said they'd experienced GI symptoms in the last week and that was in 2019 before GLP-1s were a thing. Uh 50 million Americans have a diagnosed urinary tract condition. 60 million Americans have a diagnosed gut health condition and you have a 10% lifetime risk of being diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract. So that's about one in six US cancers. And the earliest signs they leave are microscopic blood in your waist. And so there's a, you know, our ultimate vision is building what we call the first continuous cancer screener.

Okay. Microscopic. So you can't just use a camera on the inside of the toilet. What is the actual data capture? You can't put everything into a mass spec either. So you're somewhere in between. What is the actual sensor stack like?

So the device we're launching today is Throne One. This is a camera and microphone that clips onto the side of your toilet.

Okay.

Just like that. Like that.

Super easy.

Easy. And from there, it has a little uh sensor on the top here that detects when someone is at the toilet or sitting on the toilet.

Sure.

Uses your Bluetooth to know this is Scott versus John or Jordy.

Sure.

Uh so that's hands-free, automatic. Once you've installed it, you never have to touch it or think about it. Uh and then it uses a dozen different computer vision models in the back end to track gut health, urinary function, prostate health, and hydration. And then the last big category or the last ultimate innovation that we're marching towards is that smoke detector for urinary tract and GI cancers. And so this is a uh R&D device that's going into the future throne. Got it.

That can image across nine different wavelengths looking for the unique spectral fingerprint of hemoglobin.

Yeah. So you can go deeper than just a photo. Uh I sort of don't want a ton of push notifications from this thing. I only want it to call me when something's a problem.

Except that's you. But I would expect the average the people love There's almost nothing that Americans love more than health data. I guess obsessed with it.

What is consumer sleep score? What's wrong with checking your

And then what is uh what what what do consumers demand and then what do you actually do?

So when you say what did consumers demand?

Yeah. Yeah. Like like how often do consumers want to hear from the device in terms of reporting in terms of do they want a weekly newsletter? Do they want a daily report? Do they want to push notification constantly? Like, yes, you're right. I check my sleep score a lot, but most of that's just because I'm competitive with you. I I don't actually want to push notification about my sleep every single day. I more want to be able to look back on it and understand a trend and understand, okay, actually, there's a long-term trend here. Maybe I need to get to bed earlier or something like that. Like, I I I don't actually, it's not in my daily review of my life, but what are your customers seeing and what's most effective? Because ideally for me as a customer, I would just say, "Hey, just just be quiet unless there's a problem and then tell me to go to the doctor."

Yeah. And I think for people who have healthy GI tracts, that is a perfectly reasonable position.

Yep.

And for people who are, you know, having a gut health journey, so to say,

the number one thing they want is well, two things. Number one, if they're working with physicians or caretakers,

y

patient reported outcomes are notoriously terrible, particularly when it comes to your gut health. And so bringing a objective measure of my gut health into my physician's office is a huge leg up. Like the word that comes to mind that keeps coming up in these conversations is people say it's humiliating to be asked to keep a spreadsheet of their balance. So automating that is huge. The other big thing is,

wait, really quickly on that on that point, is is is the is the patient experience just like patient goes into the doctor's office and says, "Hey, I have this app. Let me open it on my phone. You can just scroll through it." Is it as simple as that?

So, that's what it is. Right now, we are building exports and then the next big like you know the first kind of B2B feature set is going to be a

like a provider dashboard that allows the provider to request Exactly. that

kind data is like 99% of the battle, right? Okay, cool.

I I didn't mean to cut you off. Second thing.

Yeah. Second big thing is, and this is kind of the thing that has historically plagued any wearable device is

when you have a wearable, you're by necessity measuring outputs, right?

Quality of sleep, your heart rate, those are all outputs. And what people want to be told is what are the inputs I need to change to optimize my outputs. And when it comes to gut health, so much of that has to do with diet and lifestyle

to understand what are my dietary triggers, what are my sensitivities, what are my intolerances. And this is true of people with, you know, enzyatic deficiencies as well as IBS and IBD. And so we are building a what we call an AI gut health coach that will allow you to narrate what are the things that I ate and what does my lifestyle look like? What are my exogenous stressors? And then it correlates those against your objective ground truth gut health to be able to tell you these are the things that are best and worse for your health specifically.

And it bas ultimately we call this like gastroyping, right? Which is like how can we understand the black box that is your gut specifically. And when we have this at scale, we'll have 10,000 other users that have a similar profile of inputs and outputs and we'll know what are the things that work best for them and let's start you there.

Talk about customer acquisition strategy, marketing, top of funnel. It feels like it's sort of hard to bring like a really cool celebrity on board for this potentially. At the same time, like this might just go viral naturally. Like are you doing influencer strategies? Are you spending a lot of money on meta platforms? Like there's alpha there's alpha for for celebs to be like super transparent around this sort of can deepen a connection with with their audience.

Yeah. Yeah. Row and Serena Williams that was sort of an unlikely partnership and it and it happened. But what what are you thinking in terms of uh the next couple years of of of marketing?

Yeah. So we want to do what function health and superpower have done with blood testing or what levels did with continuous glucose monitoring. like metabolic health straight up was not a term until they breathed that into the zeitgeist.

And the playbook there is align yourself with the most credible physician in that space online.

And so we've done that. Our chief of science is Dr. Kurran Rajin. He's the biggest GI doctor on the internet has 10 million followers across Tik Tok, Twitter, uh YouTube and Instagram. And he's our chief of science. He's an amazing health communicator and educator. And so, you know, he is equity aligned and working with us to help educate people about functional GI and why tracking things like urinary function and prostate health are important and can help improve your health outcomes. The next big piece of this is to your point celebrities, influencers. I've been amazed at, you know, we have like even back when we had like a thousand followers on Instagram, probably like 5% of our pre-orders were celebrities and like celebrity entrepreneurs. Like it's crazy. There's

I I give celebrities credit for being really on the cutting edge of longevity and thinking forward about, you know, what is it going to look like when I'm 80 85. Mhm.

How did you uh how did you process Coler coming out with uh with with their version of a smart toilet? When I saw that,

it was it's a shock to me cuz when we first met, I was like, Scott's crazy. This idea is crazy. The the it's it's going to be, you know, this incredible challenge, but the beauty of it is no, nobody's going to be crazy enough to compete with him. and and then I saw it was sometime last year Coler came out and I was like

I guess Scott's really on to something if if Coler you know is uh so anyways my view is super validating but how did you process it?

Uh the same I think you know the biblical David was a shepherd until he met Goliath

and Coler is incredibly validating here right like it shifts the conversation from why would you want a device like this to which device like this is better and why would I want this? Uh and I You know, I have opinions on the product, but I'll say it's an immaculately engineered product and they paid attention to a lot of the wrong things. You have to manually start it every time you use the toilet.

And like, you've been going to the bathroom the same way since you were potty trained at two years old. Introducing one extra step into that routine is just not reasonable. That's not meeting people where they are.

Great point. And I personally I don't trust Big toilet. I don't trust Big Toilet. I'm not going to I'm not going to give Big Toilet my data.

Yeah. I mean, also just uh you know, a like a new toilet can cost like $1,000. This product is much cheaper than that. And so for a lot of folks, they'll just say, "Well, there's actually no problem with the rest of the device. I I I just want to get this as an add-on." Uh similar to a sleep, people like the bed that they're sleeping on. They just get the cover.

Yeah.

It's a time off.

Awesome, Scott. Well, I'm so excited for for this to be out in the world and and uh to finally uh for you to finally be launched. I know how hard you've been working on this for so long and it's awesome to see all the progress and how how intentional the whole product is.