The public bathroom, reconsidered - solar-powered, sensor-wired, and somehow delightful.
EXHIBIT A. A Throne in the wild. It flushes, it charges by the sun, and it quietly counts every visit. Not your gas-station porta-potty.
On a sidewalk in Long Beach, a stainless-steel box hums to itself. Someone taps a card, the door unlocks, and inside there is running water, a real flushing toilet, a baby-changing table, free menstrual products, and - improbably - music. They wash their hands and leave. Twenty-one sensors take note. None of them care who that person was. All of them care whether the floor is still clean.
That box is a Throne. Throne Labs makes self-contained, solar-powered public restrooms and rents them to cities as a service. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple: drop a clean bathroom wherever people actually need one, then use real-time data to keep it clean. The company now runs across four regions and more than 20 cities, and in October 2025 it closed the initial tranche of a $15 million Series B.
For a company whose entire product is a place to pee, that is a strange amount of momentum. The explanation is that nobody else made the boring thing work.
Here is a number that should embarrass a wealthy country: as of 2021, the United States ranked 30th in the world for public toilets, at roughly eight per 100,000 people. Cities know this. They also know that the traditional fix - pour a concrete restroom building, then pray it survives - costs a fortune, takes years, and frequently ends up locked, broken, or quietly demolished.
The result is a familiar urban standoff. Everyone agrees public restrooms are good. Almost no one wants to own the maintenance bill, the safety questions, or the politics of where to put one. So the bathroom becomes the piece of infrastructure everybody needs and nobody champions.
Throne's founders looked at that standoff and saw a service problem wearing a construction costume. You do not need to build a building. You need a clean room that shows up fast, cleans itself on a schedule, and proves it is working.
Fletcher Wilson did not arrive at public sanitation through a spreadsheet. He has lived with irritable bowel syndrome, which is a polite clinical way of saying he has spent his life mapping the nearest bathroom in every city he has ever walked through. Most people forget that anxiety the moment it passes. Wilson built a company out of it.
He co-founded Throne Labs in 2020 in Washington, D.C., alongside Jessica Heinzelman, who serves as COO. The team they assembled leans on engineering, entrepreneurship, and social impact in roughly equal measure - which tracks, because the product has to be all three at once: a piece of hardware, a business, and a small act of public dignity.
The bet was that cities would pay for outcomes, not objects. Not "here is a unit, good luck," but "here is a clean restroom, maintained, monitored, and reported on, for a predictable fee." It is the difference between selling a treadmill and selling a gym membership. Boring to explain. Hard to walk away from once it works.
Fletcher Wilson and Jessica Heinzelman start Throne Labs to fix the public restroom gap.
A Throne lands in D.C.'s Capitol Riverfront. The pilot era begins in earnest.
Ann Arbor logs 100,000 uses and signs a five-year deal. Long Beach hits 31,000 uses in four months and extends. When D.C. tried to remove a unit, residents petitioned to keep it.
Throne wins a 64-unit, four-year LA Metro contract ahead of the 2028 Olympics, and revenue climbs 176% year over year.
Brentwood Associates leads the round to fund a national footprint beyond the current four regions.
A Throne unit is fully ADA-compliant and arrives needing almost nothing from the site - it runs on solar, so there's no waiting on a utility hookup. Inside: a flushing toilet, a running-water sink, ventilation, a baby-changing station, and free menstrual products. You get in with a QR code or an NFC tap card, which sounds like friction until you realize it is the quiet mechanism that keeps the space accountable and safe.
Then there is the data layer, which is the part that actually makes this a technology company. Each unit carries 21 sensors that report usage, cleanliness, and maintenance in real time. Cleaning happens on demand, when the data says so, not on a guessed schedule. Cities get transparent performance reports instead of complaints.
And here Throne does something most "smart" hardware refuses to do: it collects less. One of the company's stated values is, in plain English, "don't be creepy." The sensors watch the room, not the person. For a product people use at their most vulnerable, that restraint is not a footnote. It is the whole reason anyone trusts the door.
The strongest evidence for Throne is not a slogan, it is renewal behavior. Pilots are easy to win and easy to quietly drop. Throne's keep turning into contracts. Ann Arbor's year-long trial crossed 100,000 uses and became a five-year agreement, with one official noting ratings "have been through the roof." Long Beach logged 31,000 uses in four months and extended. A D.C. unit served over 63,000 users, and when the city moved to close it, the public pushed back hard enough to reverse the decision.
That last detail is the one to sit with. People do not usually petition to keep a porta-potty.
Figures are approximate and drawn from public reporting and Wikipedia. Each became a renewal or extension - the metric Throne actually optimizes for.
Strip away the sensors and the Series B and you are left with a sentence the company actually uses: a world where people live their best lives without worrying about where the closest restroom is. It sounds modest. It is not. A reliable public bathroom is the difference between a city that works for parents, transit riders, delivery drivers, older adults, and people with medical conditions - and one that quietly excludes them.
Throne's culture is built to keep that human. Its six values run from "be loveable" to "the owner-plumber," the idea that no one, regardless of title, is above unclogging the thing. Transparency is royal. The jokes are real, and so is the seriousness underneath them. This is a company that decided the most overlooked piece of civic infrastructure deserved its best engineers.
The Series B is pointed at scale: more cities, more regions, a national footprint instead of four. The LA Metro contract is the lighthouse - 64 units feeding into a city preparing for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, two events that will dump millions of people onto sidewalks and ask, very loudly, where the bathrooms are.
If Throne is right, the answer stops being a shrug. The model - measurable, maintained, rapidly deployable public space - does not have to stop at restrooms. But it starts there, because that is the need nobody else would touch.
Back in Long Beach, the stainless-steel box is still humming. Someone taps a card, washes their hands, and leaves without a second thought. That thoughtlessness is the entire point. The best public infrastructure is the kind you never have to think about - and for once, the bathroom is keeping notes so you don't have to.