Bower Raises $2 Mn Pre-Seed to Build AI-Powered Operating System for Research Labs

The round also included angel investors such as Yu Liu, Dean Kelly, Harry Uffindell, and Emma Ferrier, along with strategic advisor Bernhard Hans Weigl.

Bower is building an operating system for scientific research. While many AI tools for science focus on tasks such as generating ideas, reviewing research papers, and modelling biology, Bower focuses on what happens inside the laboratory.

The company calls its approach “augmented research”, which aims to help scientists manage and record their research work more effectively.

Bower wants to solve a common problem in scientific research: important details from experiments are often not properly recorded. Researchers make hundreds of decisions during an experiment, such as changing methods, dealing with unexpected results, or noticing small details.

Bower’s platform is designed to capture this knowledge so it can be reproduced, shared, and used by other researchers, rather than being lost when an individual researcher moves on.

CEO and co-founder Michelle MacRae joined from Microsoft, where she led generative AI video, having previously built AI products at Dovetail and Google.

“Wearables have spent years searching for the perfect use case. Science is that use case,” MacRae said. “Researchers already wear PPE glasses for hours a day. With Bower, that same interface becomes intelligent. It can understand what a scientist is doing, capture what they learn, automate the administrative work around the experiment and bring the organisation’s collective knowledge back to them in real time. The scientist stays focused on the science while Bower handles everything around it.”

“We’ve watched ambient AI and scribing transform clinical work through companies like Heidi and Abridge, where the win came from capturing what was said in the room rather than making the clinician type it up afterwards. Bower is taking that same idea to the research bench,” said Stew Glynn, Managing Partner at TEN13, who led the round.

The raise comes as AI labs increasingly position their frontier models as engines for scientific discovery. Glynn argues the harder problem sits upstream: “LLMs have gotten very good at reasoning about science and breaking down complex problems. What they still can’t do is see what happened in the lab. Most of that work never gets written down, so it never reaches the next researcher, the next model, or the paper. Bower fixes the input problem, and that’s the constraint everyone else is building on top of.”

Bower is a Gold Coast-based technology company building software for scientific research laboratories. It aims to help researchers record and manage the work they do during experiments.

Unlike many AI tools that focus on research papers or generating scientific ideas, Bower focuses on what happens inside the lab. Its platform helps capture important details such as changes to methods, unexpected results, and observations made during experiments.

The goal is to make scientific work easier to document, reproduce, and share, so valuable research knowledge does not get lost.

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