The story behind LabNotes.ai

Rebecca Coates has spent her career in chemistry — first as an undergraduate researcher, then earning her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Utah, where she studied transition metal ion interactions using mass spectrometry. Today she’s an Assistant Professor of Chemistry, teaching the next generation of STEM students.

She’s also watched AI change her classroom in ways she didn’t expect.

Over the past couple of years, Becky started noticing a shift. Students were submitting homework that was technically correct but conceptually hollow — right answers arrived at through shortcuts that skipped the thinking entirely. It wasn’t just happening in her courses. Across higher education, professors in every STEM discipline were seeing the same thing: AI tools had become the path of least resistance, and students were learning less because of it.

The response across higher education was predictable. Ban AI. Rewrite syllabi. Add proctoring. Build walls.

Becky saw that differently.

Preventing students from using AI is a losing battle — and it doesn’t prepare them for a world where these tools are everywhere. The question isn’t how do we stop students from using AI? It’s how do we make AI actually help them learn?

That question became LabNotes.ai.

The idea was straightforward: what if the AI couldn’t give students the answer? What if instead it did what a great tutor does — asked the right question at the right time, caught common mistakes, and guided students toward understanding step by step? And what if professors had full control over what the AI could access, how it behaved, and what data it collected?

Becky brought 14 years of teaching experience, deep knowledge of where students struggle and why, and a network of educators across higher education who share the same frustrations. She knew exactly what a tool like this needed to do, because she’d been wishing it existed for years. Paired with a co-founder whose career has been spent building software people actually want to use, LabNotes.ai took shape — not as a theoretical product, but as a direct response to real problems she sees every single day.

Her classroom challenges became the design requirements. Her students’ struggles became the test cases. The frustrations she’s heard from educators across STEM became the feature list.

LabNotes.ai isn’t being built in a vacuum. It’s being built by someone who walks into a classroom every day, stands in front of students, and sees firsthand what works, what doesn’t, and what they actually need to succeed. Every feature exists because Becky has lived the problem it solves.