What the money is actually for
Three things.
1. People: We're expanding the team, particularly in engineering and science.
2. Hardware: the next generation of the device, with improved sensing, more information from each session, and the hardware foundation for updated features.
3. Science: the advisors, research, and the validation work required to do bigger things responsibly.
The long game
Our vision is to build the smoke detector for colon cancer, and for the other cancers of the lower GI and urinary tracts. Something passive and always on, quiet until the day it has something important to tell you.
We want to be precise about that sentence, because precision matters more than excitement here. Throne today doesn't diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, and it will not tell you that you have cancer. That is where we're going, not where we are, and getting there means research, validation, and regulatory work. This round moves us materially closer, but it does not collapse the distance.
We think it's achievable anyway.
The broader premise is established: stool contains clinically useful signals for colorectal cancer, and validated stool-based screening already saves lives. What has not yet been established is whether those signals can be captured continuously and passively in the way we intend to build.
One of the largest barriers is not whether useful signals exist, but whether people complete screening when they're due and follow through when a result is abnormal. Screening asks you to notice you're due, order or schedule something, and follow through on a task nobody enjoys. Millions of people who intend to screen simply don't, and a test that doesn't get taken saves no one.
A sensor that can read every session automatically, day after day, without asking anything of you, could remove one of the largest barriers to early detection: knowing when it's time to get the test done.
The current product is not a temporary stepping stone we plan to leave behind. The daily gut and hydration insights members use now are valuable on their own, and improving them is part of the same roadmap.
Who's building it
Throne was co-founded by Scott Hickle, Tim Blumberg, and John Capodilupo. John, formerly CTO at WHOOP, has already helped build consumer health hardware at scale. Dr. Karan Rajan, one of the more prominent voices in gastrointestinal health, joined as Chief of Science. David Strasfeld, PhD, joined as SVP of R&D from Lumicell, where he worked on cancer detection technology. Ben Grynol joined as VP of Growth, formerly Head of Growth at Levels Health.
Then there's our Scientific Advisory Board, which is, frankly, stacked. Between them, these physicians have authored the American College of Gastroenterology's clinical guidelines for ulcerative colitis, SIBO, and colorectal cancer screening, and carry more than 100,000 citations combined:
- Dr. David T. Rubin (University of Chicago Medicine), lead author of the ACG practice guidelines for ulcerative colitis and one of the world's foremost authorities on inflammatory bowel disease.
- Dr. Aasma Shaukat (NYU Grossman School of Medicine), first author of the 2021 ACG guidelines on colorectal cancer screening and a member of the U.S. Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer.
- Dr. Folasade (Fola) May (UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine), a nationally recognized leader in colorectal cancer prevention and health equity, with NIH-funded research recognized by the Biden Cancer Moonshot.
- Dr. Mark Pimentel (Cedars-Sinai), lead author of the 2020 ACG guideline on SIBO, whose research reframed irritable bowel syndrome as a microbially driven condition.
- Dr. Satish Rao (Augusta University), co-author of the 2020 ACG SIBO guideline and the researcher who identified dyssynergic defecation and its treatment.
- Dr. Vipul Jairath (Western University), a leading authority on clinical trial design in inflammatory bowel disease, with more than 400 peer-reviewed publications.
You don't recruit people like that to build a novelty gadget. You recruit them because you intend to do the hard version: build something that can earn a role in serious healthcare.
What this means if you use Throne
In short, more, sooner. Faster iteration, better insights, and continued work on the Gut Health Coach we launched in beta earlier this month, which lets you ask questions about your own data and get answers grounded in your actual patterns rather than general advice.
And if you don't use Throne yet: the pitch isn't that you should become obsessed with your own digestion. It's that you shouldn't have to be in order to track your gut health.
You've been producing the data your whole life. We believe something should be reading it, quietly, every flush, and speaking up when something changes.
