Bower raises $2M pre-seed to build an AI-powered operating system for scientific research

Bower has closed a $2 million pre-seed round to develop what it describes as an AI research operating system, built around smart lab goggles designed to capture scientific experiments in real time and prevent institutional knowledge from disappearing.

The core problem Bower is targeting is a familiar one in research environments: the gap between what happens at the bench and what gets formally recorded. Experiments are conducted, observations are made, and critical details are often lost before they can be documented. Bower's approach is to embed AI directly into the physical act of doing science, using lab goggles as the capture device.

No lead investors were disclosed in connection with the $2 million raise. The company has not announced a valuation.

The funding will go toward building out the platform, which Bower positions as an operating system for research rather than a standalone tool — suggesting an ambition to sit at the center of how scientific work is organized, stored, and retrieved across a lab or institution.

The announcement arrives as AI-assisted tools for scientific workflows have drawn increasing investor attention, with startups targeting everything from literature review to lab automation. Bower's angle — capturing knowledge at the moment of creation through wearable hardware — represents a distinct approach to the documentation problem that has long plagued wet labs and research facilities.