24hs Inside an $18M Health Tech Startup Tracking Gut Health

0:02 One of the reasons colorectal cancer is as deadly as it is is because very often people ignore the signs until it's late stage. That is the difference between life and death. >> Almost every signal the body produces is now tracked by something you wear. But one of the oldest indicators in medicine has been left completely untouched because it's one of the most culturally uncomfortable subjects in health. But the startup I'm visiting today has built its entire business to go exactly where consumer health has never bothered to look.

0:30 >> Our mission is not only to improve health and one day save lives with every flush, but it's also to make taboo conversations more approachable, more human, more accessible. >> I'm going behind the scenes with Throne Science, a health tech startup building out of Austin, Texas, that's built a computer vision sensor for your toilet that reads gut health, hydration, urinary function, and eventually early bowel cancer detection. Scott brought in the co-founder of Whoop, John Capidal Loopo, and they've raised close to $18 million with a series A led by Will Ventures and Emerson Collective. If you have an Alexa in your home or an iRoot that vacuum cleaner, you already have cameras and microphones in your home that aren't telling you anything about your health. I think in 20 years, you'll be equally crazy not to have one of these devices in your toilet because this could literally save your life. Bow cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in Americans under 50 and cases in young adults have risen more than 50% since 1994. So the real question I want to understand is whether a device people buy for daily health insights can become the thing that catches cancer early.

1:37 Okay, we are up super early. We're actually staying overlooking Lake Travis in Austin, Texas. I don't know if you guys can see that down there. It is absolutely gorgeous. The sun's coming up. We're up early again, but this time also for a pretty epic reason. We're going behind the scenes with Scott from Throne Science. They're a consumer health tech startup. They've built a clippable sensor that sits on a toilet lid and tracks your bowel movements for all sorts of things like gut health, dehydration, even bowel cancers, which sadly I've seen is becoming a lot more prevalent in younger people. They've raised a total of around $18 million so far between preede seed and series A.

2:17 We're going to find out kind of what that money is being used for and and you know whether it's more on growth and go to market versus product development. We'll find out. And what better way to start a day with health tech founders than to hit the gym in Austin. we're going to Lyft ATX. >> All right, we're outside the gym. All right, it's first exercise and he's already smoking us. We saw this coming. New dad strength. I got a fourmonth-old at home.

2:49 >> Oh, crazy. So, it's carrying the baby strength. >> We're going to do man >> while we're gassed and like super pumped. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> What made you do this? Both my parents are doctors. >> My dad's a medical device inventor. So, I was just raised around healthcare. On my mom's side, both of my maternal grandparents had colon cancer. On my dad's side, there is a lot of IBD, both Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.

3:23 Ultimately, the idea of a smart toilet was first pitched to me as a joke. But I called my mom and asked her, you know, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waist? Oh my god. >> Yes. >> Probably the line that sticks with me the most. She told me, "Honey, I stopped giving my phone number to my patients years ago cuz they sent me so many pictures of their poop." That inspired me to actually take this seriously.

3:43 Started doing homework and arrived at the perspective like it is crazy that there are, you know, you're wearing a Whoop, I've got a Whoop and an or he's got an Apple Watch. There's 20 devices to choose from for measuring your exercise and your sleep and your cardio and your metabolic health, you know, but there's nothing that gives you that same degree of daily insight in your gut health, your hydration, your urinary function, your prostate health, all the clues that we leave in the toilet every single day, half a dozen times a day.

4:08 Then it became particularly motivating when I realized like, wait a second, there's not just an opportunity to improve daily health, but literally save lives from the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50, the second deadliest cancer in the country, and the fastest growing colorectal cancer. So that's that's the mission is improve health and one day save lives with every flush. >> All right, we wrapped. We've done our we've done our hard yards, which, you know, arguably wasn't a full workout, but that's all right. The vision behind a product like this, it's like a privilege to have this on the channel.

4:35 These guys are truly solving problems that sadly so systemic. I know a lot of friends who have family that have had this problem too and to have like such a solid core team around this building this is is pretty special. >> So I say to the audience that doesn't know who you are, do you want to introduce yourself and like yeah how you're a part of the team? >> Yeah. Bit of background on me. I'm a surgeon, gut surgeon specifically. So my entire professional career has been dealing with gut disorders, removing colon cancers, digestive diseases. I've just always been interested in like preventative health and how we can stop the downstream consequences of the worst case scenario which is colorectile cancer. I came across a video about this throne concept, this tracker that can track your poop and hydration and everything. And I was like, I need to speak to the founders. Scott replied like the next day.

5:23 >> Did you? >> Yeah. >> Oh yeah. I looked him up. I was like, wait, I I recognize that face. And then cuz he reached out on LinkedIn. I've never seen him on LinkedIn before, but I'd seen him on Instagram a billion times. >> And then, you know, he came to my house, we had dinner, you know, Scott's girlfriend Jos came around as well. He met my family, my parents, my wife, and then we just had a great time. And then next thing I know, I'm out in Austin hoping to basically build something that can stop colon cancer in its tracks, be the smoke signal for colon cancer, which is, you know, I think the biggest thing I'll ever do in my life.

6:03 Romney's tree, where are we? So, we are at Throne HQ. This is our new office. We just moved in a couple months ago. So, this is a strange building. One of our requirements for having an office is that we control the toilets because we need to run experiments and test new things. So, that means we can't really use traditional office space where you would share an office or a bathroom with other office space. A lot of the office buildings around here are that format.

6:28 So, we got very fortunate. This was the only building on the market that really fit our needs in terms of having enough room for us to grow into. It's a very strange building because it was originally built as an artist residence/studio. So, I'll give you a tour here down of the studio first. >> All right. >> This is Pissbot. So, I'll give you brief tour. So, this device simulates PA flows. So literally this is plugged into a vessel of water and we put this in front of a toilet and this is a flow flow rate meter. So it measures how fast the fluid is coming out and we can simulate pea streams from different heights and different angles. And we use that to train our AI model for how to interpret the sound of a man's pea stream and turn that into what's called an urinary flow rate curve which is one of the most important markers of prostate health. So >> wow. So it's it's tracking sound based on the strength of the flow.

7:24 >> Exactly. So like intuitively as a man you know the difference between the sound of a weak stream and a strong stream, right? Like you walk into a bathroom and like it's like a locker room joke, right? we stream. And it turns out that's because like the acoustics of a weak stream are very different than the acoustics of a healthy flow. And we can actually measure that because the instantaneous urinary flow rate maps one one to the volume the acoustic volume of that flow rate when it's when you are peeing straight into the water basin. So if you pee onto the side of the water bowl it's kind of stealth mode and doesn't work the same. Right.

7:57 >> Nice. Nice. >> But it is one of the more important markers for prostate health. >> >> What is this room? Tell me. Give me the context behind it. What's What's the vibe? >> This is the podcast studio. So, we needed a place to record highquality content that is educational, thoughtful content about all things gut health and urinary function and hydration. A place to talk about what we do and tell our story and bring other people on to tell their story. So much of our mission is not only to improve health and one day save lives with every flush, but it's also to make taboo conversations more approachable, more human, more accessible.

8:43 >> You guys haven't seen the product yet. So, first of all, there's an evolution here, too. Like, run me through this. What's >> Yeah. Yeah. This is Throne. It is a camera that clips onto the side of your toilet, like so, and then uses a motion sensor to know anytime you're at the toilet. And it's basically a wearable for your toilet that tracks gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and urinary function or prostate health hands-free automatically every time you go to the bathroom. So, it's on when it's supposed to be. It's off when it's supposed to be. It's built with privacy in mind. It respects your users. It respects guests.

9:13 So, it only works if I have already paired my Bluetooth to the device. And then anytime it uses or it senses that my phone is nearby, it will automatically turn on and then record what's happening inside the toilet bowl. And when I leave, the motion sensor knows that I'm no longer there and it turns itself off. And then I get a push notification to my phone here in a couple minutes that'll tell me hydration score, gut health score, all good stuff. So >> wild. So So again, simply put, it's hardware with an app.

9:49 >> Exactly. It's it's it's literally like we joke, but it's not a joke. gets whoop for your poop or aura for your flora. The it gives you daily digestive health insights, hydration insights every time you go to the bathroom multiple times a day. And it all gets sent to an app. >> That makes sense. What is the sensor? What is that? >> It's a camera and a microphone. And so this allows us to track all of the physical morphological qualities of stool and urine that can be inferred optically. And ultimately, as I mentioned, the vision of the company, pun intended, is not just to become a health tracker, but a genuinely life-saving breakthrough innovation that finds the earliest signs of colon cancer and bladder cancer and kidney cancer and rectal cancer and urer cancer. And that incorporates more powerful optical sensors. So right now this is RGB and we'll add multisspectral imaging across a variety of different wavelengths in infrared and ultraviolet including visible light to look for the spectral fingerprint of hemoglobin which is blood. And one of the earliest signs of those cancers is microscopic blood in your waist that is invisible to the naked eye.

10:59 >> Okay, cool. Now we can go again. >> Let's go grab coffee. Almond little taster. >> So run me through the go to market. Like what does it actually look like for a product at a brand like this? >> Every company does and should have its own strategy. And if you go after a healthy person and they use a product and they're already healthy and they're like, "Yeah, it was pretty cool." And they get diminishing returns on their value. Well, that's not like that is a customer, but it doesn't mean it's a sticky and retentative customer. And so, you get back to like what does the tape measure that we built? What does what does thrown do and who can it serve?

11:45 Like the clearest segment that is obvious like no one's ever going to argue is people with gut health conditions. Like to them, they go, "Wow, you've got something that's like, hey, this is continuous and automatic and hands-free." It's thrown. If they are working with practitioners, well, practitioners are in the business of acquiring customers. And so if they can be conduit where they're saying, "Hey, you're providing with the tape measure to be able to help my my patients get better insight, track their trends over time, like it is a very easy value prop to communicate cuz you're not selling.

12:17 They're just like this is something we never had and now we have it." Great. >> What we haven't talked about yet is a pricing model as well. So like where does that sit in the piece? Is it hardware purchase plus subscription? Like what does it kind of look like? >> I can actually draw this out for you on a curve. I had a a for a former product manager at Whoop map this out for me and I think it's just one of the the most brilliant observations of all time which is that this curve describes the value that you as a user get out of your health product. And what that means is there's this insights period, right? The first 3 6 months where you're learning new things about yourself on a daily, weekly basis, and you feel like, oh, wow, this is so cool. And then at some point it tapers off, right? And it's not zero, but it's not at peak anymore. And like occasionally there might be bumps where you're like, oh, I learned a new thing about myself. Oh, like I got sick and you know, my aura gave me the major symptoms warning. I'm like, oh wow, I feel like I got a lot of value out of that. And that might happen years down the line. But for the most part, on average, you know, over the course of a population, that's what the curve looks like. If you are charging anywhere near this value, right? Cuz like your what you charge is price and what the customer gets is value are two different things because you want your your price to be way below the value that you're delivering so that no one ever churns. You want retentive customers who stick with the product year after year, especially for a product like ours, which is aiming to be a preventive health tool. We have to charge a low subscription fee and charge upfront for the hardware itself. So, we charge $399 upfront for the hardware and then $6 a month for the monthly subscription.

14:12 It's such a privilege to cover startups like this. Again, a lot of like what you would have seen on the channel, there's a lot of AI because that is the flavor of Silicon Valley right now and venture capital entrepreneurship. To go behind the scenes with a completely different company doing something that is raising venture money, by the way, and is raising like $18 million all up is amazing. I think we're about to jump into a growth meeting as well. So, let's go check it out. We want to take inspiration from a campaign that ran seven years ago for seed probiotics called Give a for Science. And so they ran a campaign where they asked people to basically contribute photos to help build throne years before Throne existed, like seven years before. And so in 2019, they built this website. They did this whole campaign and there was a different website if you went on desktop versus mobile.

15:06 and so this you can see desktop you couldn't really do anything, right? It was just scroll here, give your email. But if you want an if you want on mobile, it was like this beautifully designed crazy thing basically explaining give us pictures of your poop cuz we're trying to train an AI model to understand the Bristol school scale. And this is great for us because we actually already have an AI model that understands the Bristol school scale as accurately as board-certified gastroenterologists, which is one of our first abstracts we're publishing here in a couple months. Super excited about that. Now, one thing I was actually thinking about because you know this doubles as just a great try before you buy almost as well.

15:43 >> Totally. >> Now, what if we rewarded people with both the habit and consistency of up to like five uploads? >> Mhm. >> And then they have a different tier of freebie. Like for example, people who upload 5 to 7 across the month get access to an exclusive webinar hosted by me as like a general education. So we can form the habit in people checking their poop and using Throne and also give them some freebies from the different tiers.

16:10 >> I love it. >> What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started this whole thing? >> The only thing we have as a company right now, the best thing we have going for us is the size, the importance, the resonance of our mission and our vision. That is what has allowed us to attract the worldass team that we have now. That's what it's allowed us that you know Curran the world's most followed GI doctor found us on LinkedIn and Cold reached out to us because he resonated with the importance of what we're building. I was able to recruit the co-founder of Whoop to be my co-founder. We have the world's leading researchers and they work with us because they believe in the future that we are pitching and they see it as important and inevitable. Again, we are not shy about the fact that we're on a decade long journey. This is not going to be an overnight success. And you see how important this is and you see on patients faces who are living with chronic digestive disease how important it is to them. Let's stop colon cancer is another one of those missions that's just so big people cannot help be attracted to it.