Why We're Building Rowan

Here’s an unfortunate truth: when it comes to software, science is decades behind other fields. Right now, it’s possible to download a dozen gambling, gaming, or dating apps that are fast, simple, and easy-to-use—but designing life-saving drugs requires the use of frustrating programs that would have felt dated in the mid-2000s. This feels wrong.

We’re starting Rowan because we think that scientific software shouldn’t be hard to use. We want to work towards a world where chemists have easy access to modern computational tools. Using software for your research shouldn’t take years of training or arcane command-line skills; it should be as easy as Venmo or ChatGPT. Chemists should be rate-limited by their ideas, not by their hacked-together computational workflows.

We believe this is one of the most important things we can be working on. Computing is changing the world; even the most physical of occupations—mining, manufacturing, transportation—now rely on dedicated software tools to function efficiently. This is no less true in science. Computation is a key part of modern research, and making it accessible to more researchers will increase scientific productivity, but this can’t happen without high-quality software tools.

And good tools are one of the most important things that scientists can create. Scientific discoveries are useless until someone creates tools that enable their use by real people. NMR spectrometers didn’t just appear in the basement of every university: it took a sustained effort to take a scientific discovery—NMR—and turn it into a product that scientists could use for their research. Without a lot of applied science and engineering, the basic science behind NMR would have remained purely of intellectual interest.

In short, we find the idea of building new tools unbelievably exciting. But looking around, we don’t see many other people pursuing this vision. Most chemists work in academia, which is poorly structured for the task of building polished software products, or in large companies with a specific focus on something other than tool-building. We see room for a complementary approach.

Rowan will be a for-profit company building modern software tools for chemistry and focused on providing utility to real researchers. We’re not worried about the impact of our publications or the novelty of our ideas; we just want to make things that scientists will want to use. If we can create value for users, that’s enough for us.

Of course, we’re not the only private company trying to make software for the life sciences. There are others in this space—and more that have tried similar ideas before—but we’re confident we bring a different approach. We’re not building some massive proprietary platform that promises solutions that sound too good to be true; instead, we believe that by solving real issues for real users as quickly as possible, we’ll be able to locate the most interesting unsolved problems and build impactful solutions.

We’re not ready to share exactly what we’re working on yet. We’re coding as fast as we can, but we’re still a few months away from sharing our first product with the world. In the meantime, you can subscribe to this newsletter to get additional updates. And if you’re excited by what we’re doing or there’s a problem that you’d like us to work on, let us know via email!