Bower’s augmented research approach has AI working alongside scientists to understand experiments as they happen. Bower Capture turns what a researcher says, sees, and does at the bench into a structured record of voice, video, images, and instrument readings, all of it organized and timestamped automatically.

Record turns that material into a searchable repository connected across experiments, protocols, people, and instruments, and Co-scientist lets a researcher query all of it to troubleshoot a problem or see what knowledge the lab has already accumulated in that area.

The company was founded on a simple discipline: talk to scientists before you build anything, and show them the work long before it feels ready to share.

“You should be embarrassed by what you’re showing. If you’re not, you’ve shown it too late.”

Michelle MacRaeCEO and Co-founder, Bower

Pen-and-paper observation and voice notes weren’t working because scientists don’t narrate their own work and in some labs, talking out loud risks contaminating a sample. Even a keyboard can be a risk in an environment where gloved hands and full attention are needed.

This is what drove the team toward smart glasses instead. Bower Glasses capture the work hands-free and voice-free. A researcher can ask Bower what tool they need before they reach for the wrong thing, helping with anxiety around their work and reducing room for error.

From day one, Bower needed somewhere for all their insights to go. Somewhere the whole team could access so the customer, and their data, were always at the center of any decision making.

As an ex-Dovetailer, Michelle knew the key role Dovetail would play in managing their research data. From the start, every recording and meeting was syncing automatically through Dovetail’s Google Drive integration, so no one was manually uploading files or chasing down the right folder.

While Bower Capture is for the bench, Dovetail is where Bower’s own customer research lives.

Running four active research programs at once—alpha research, beta prospect calls, customer success onboarding, and a dedicated PhD researcher program—through a single workspace means insights don’t stay stuck in whichever program surfaced them, and that research is accessible across the whole company.

For example, the finding that steered Bower away from voice notes and toward smart glasses came out of early alpha sessions, and it’s still there for a beta prospect call or a PhD researcher to turn up today.

Using Dovetail’s Chat feature alongside its Slack and Claude integrations, anyone at Bower can query the research library—without switching windows. Others pull evidence straight from real research interviews into their product spec work, and engineers use it too, such as for pushing back on a proposed feature with a scientist’s own words, rather than an opinion.

Dovetail Chat answers questions with citations back to the original video clip, so an answer can be traced back to the moment a scientist said it.

“An answer we can’t trace back to the moment a scientist said it isn’t the evidence we need to make decisions. Dovetail gives us the clip and context.”

Michelle MacRaeCEO and Co-founder, Bower

Investor pitch decks are just one place where real evidence is—crucially—far more convincing than a plausible-sounding summary. Using Dovetail, Bower built a highlights reel of interview clips sitting in their Dovetail workspace, and dropped it into the presentation.

The clips mean investors can see the scientists Bower is building for and independently verify them, taking it from a founder’s optimistic pitch to a convincing, evidence-driven conversation.

At Bower, Dovetail isn’t a research team’s tool, it’s shared infrastructure for the whole company. Every single recording and piece of research lands in the same workspace so anyone at Bower, from engineers to co-founders, can easily find what a scientist said before any decisions are made.

Bower has since closed an AU $2 million pre-seed round to deepen its work with design partners including Mount Sinai, Southern Cross University, and Mass Affinity Bloodless Diagnostics, with plans to scale further over the next year.

As that list of labs grows, so does the volume of research running through Bower’s Dovetail workspace—the same infrastructure that has helped get them where they are today, and that will continue to grow with the team.