Smart Home Startup, Shine Bathroom, Develops 'Smart Toilet' To Fix, Clean Toilets Easily

This California-based startup brings tech to a part of your house where you least expect it -- your bathroom. Specifically, your toilet.

A bathroom is a rare place for tech companies to visit and introduce innovative products. Sure, there are those self-heating toilet seats with motion sensor led lights or those with motion-activated flushes. But no company, except for Shine Bathroom, has gone as far as incorporating software to where people answer the call of nature.

Shine Bathroom, a company that hails from Santa Barabara, is digitizing how people clean and maintain their toilets. Their product, which consists of a cleaning pod, a water tank, a spray bar, and sensors, is designed to automate the cleaning process.

Their device works by having tap water run up the tank that contains the pod, convert it to electrolyzed water, and then travel back down to the spray bar to clean and deodorize the toilet, eliminating the need to pour in chemicals. The electrolyzed water is five times stronger than bleach but isn't as harsh, claimed by Shine.

After a "full bowl clean," the device returns to normal saline solution that's "safe for plumbing and pets."

“Bathrooms are evolving from places where we practice basic hygiene to where we prepare ourselves for the day,” said Chris Herbert, the founder and CEO of Shine. “Wellness and self care will be happening more in the home, and this is a big opportunity.”

Bathroom Assistant
What's proprietary about Shine's technology is its integration to smartphones with their Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Sam. Their AI can detect any problems in the toilet, estimate the cost for repairs and then have the results appear on the user's smartphone in real-time.

Sam can also be linked to Alexa so the user can order the machine to clean or check water levels.

As a startup company, Shine Bathroom has a total funding amount of $750,000 that was raised on Oct. 21 with investors Entrada Ventures and Mucker Capital.

Their product the Shine Bathroom Assistant is available on Indiegogo, which is also a crowdfunding platform and sells for a starting price of $99. The company has a total of 1,382 backers with Indiegogo and has raised $200,000 on Oct. 17.