He left the inside of human veins to fix the bathroom you can never find when you need it.
A public bathroom is the kind of thing you only think about when it isn't there. Fletcher Wilson thinks about it constantly. As co-founder and CEO of Throne Labs, he runs the largest network of connected public restrooms in the United States - free to use, app to enter, and quietly bristling with sensors that decide when the cleaning crew shows up.
A Throne is a self-contained, solar-capable restroom that arrives on a truck and is open for business in about two hours. No sewer hookup, no construction permits stretched across years, no plywood box that smells like a regret. Each unit packs 21 sensors that track usage and maintenance, plus the unglamorous essentials done right: a flushing toilet, running water, ADA access, a baby-changing station, and free menstrual products.
Users get in with a phone app, a QR code, or a tap card. The entry friction is the point. It keeps the unit accountable to a person without an attendant standing guard, and Wilson's data backs the bet: across more than a million uses, the misuse rate sits around 0.7%. Cleaning is scheduled by demand, not by a clipboard - high-traffic units get serviced more, low-traffic ones less, all driven by the live feed coming off the hardware.
The model has found buyers where you'd expect the most foot traffic and the fewest options: transit. Throne operates with agencies including LA Metro, Caltrain, VTA, AC Transit and the Orange County Transportation Authority. The LA Metro relationship alone is a 64-unit, four-year contract. As Wilson put it when the company announced its 2025 raise, the pitch to a city is refreshingly blunt.
We haven't lost a municipal customer yet, and we're excited to show the rest of the country how easy it can be to provide free, clean bathrooms to the public - without the cost, inflexibility and hassle of traditional infrastructure.- Fletcher Wilson, on the Series B
In October 2025, Throne Labs announced the initial close of a $15 million Series B led by Brentwood Associates, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures, Dipalo Ventures, Rabil Ventures and Arpinine Management. It pushed total funding past $31 million. The capital follows the kind of growth curve that's rare for anything bolted to a sidewalk: revenue up 176% year over year, more than 100 units deployed, and a footprint spanning Washington, D.C., the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Michigan.
When officials describe a Throne, they don't talk about the technology - they talk about the queue of constituents asking for more. In Washington, D.C., the free public toilets passed 63,000 uses by June 2025, prompting a council member to note that "people are begging us to expand." Ann Arbor ran a year-long pilot that logged 100,000 uses and then signed a five-year contract. Long Beach hit 31,000 uses in the first four months.
Reported public uses by city (selected figures, through 2025).
Wilson did not arrive at sanitation by accident. He's a mechanical engineer - a BS from the University of Pennsylvania and an MS from Stanford - who came up through the demanding world of medical devices. He cut his teeth as a lead R&D engineer at InSite Medical Technologies, then won a coveted spot as a Biodesign Innovation Fellow at Stanford's Byers Center for Biodesign from 2009 to 2011.
That fellowship produced InterVene, the company he founded in 2011 and ran for nearly a decade. InterVene's BlueLeaf System took on deep vein valve failure with an implant-free approach that lets a physician build a new valve from a patient's own vein tissue. Wilson is the first-named inventor on a dozen issued patents. It's the unlikeliest possible launchpad for a toilet startup - and exactly the training that makes Throne work: a tolerance for hardware, regulation, and problems everyone else finds unglamorous.
In 2020 he co-founded Throne with Jessica Heinzelman. She was a skeptic at first. Then she asked her friends about their own bathroom struggles, changed her mind, and signed her commitment email to Wilson with three words: "I heart toilets." It became a company value. The others are just as on-brand - "Don't be creepy," "The Owner-Plumber," "Transparency is royal."
We founded the company with the idea that there are so many different pockets of people that could benefit from more and better bathrooms in our cities.- Fletcher Wilson
Wilson's framing of the market is disarmingly simple, and he says it plainly: everyone needs a bathroom. The people most underserved by the status quo - parents wrangling toddlers, delivery and gig workers with no home base, people experiencing homelessness, anyone with a condition that doesn't wait - are the people Throne is built to reach. The plan from here is to turn a regional success into national standard-issue infrastructure, one connected unit at a time.
It's a strange thing to be evangelical about. Wilson is anyway. He treats the public restroom the way an engineer treats any neglected system: measure it, redesign it, and make it good enough that no one has to plan their day around finding one.