Dotmatics CEO Brian Lee on AI, the Acquisition and Fieldwork that Matters
By his own admission — “It’s like a straight line, right?” — Brian Lee has had a career that defies easy summary. He dabbled in biology then wound up studying math at Harvard, spent time in management consulting, earned an MBA, worked as a data analyst, a product manager and a marketer. Then there’s the detail of cooking professionally for a few years, including completing a culinary school externship in the kitchen at France’s most famous landmark. Today, he is CEO of Dotmatics, the life sciences software company acquired by Siemens in 2025 and now the nucleus of a new life sciences division within Siemens Digital Industries Software. In this conversation — edited for length and clarity, Lee talks about what it will take for AI to meaningfully accelerate scientific discovery, the benefits of being acquired by a company that gets software, and why work on the humble cassava plant matters beyond the basics of molecular biology and gene sequencing. Related strategic context on the acquisition from Siemens Digital Industries Software CEO Tony Hemmelgarn can be found in his remarks at Siemens ONE Tech – Strategy & Results 2025 in Munich.
On AI and What It Actually Takes
Q: There’s a lot of noise right now about AI transforming life sciences. What’s your perspective?
Brian: The potential is real, but I think the conversation often stops too early. AI is accelerating the front end of scientific work, hypothesis generation, analysis, prediction, faster than organizations can act on it. The bottleneck isn’t the science. It’s that discovery, development, and manufacturing are still largely disconnected. Insights generated in research don’t consistently carry through into what happens next. The digital thread that should connect those stages, preserving context, decision history and process knowledge, largely doesn’t exist yet in life sciences. That’s the gap that matters.
Q: And that’s the problem Dotmatics is trying to solve?
Brian: Exactly. That’s what Luma is built around: creating a connected digital continuum from early discovery through development and into manufacturing, so that knowledge doesn’t get stranded at any one stage. When that thread exists, AI becomes useful across the whole process, not just at individual moments. That’s what moves the industry from generating better predictions to actually getting better outcomes.
Q: What does this mean for scientists?
Brian: There’s a term called lab in the loop — the ability to have both dry lab and wet lab data coming together so that AI can be part of the experimental process. The level of rigor has to be much, much higher in our industry than in other domains, which means the data has to be better. We’re talking about drug discovery. It’s a highly regulated industry. It’s not like you can have a hallucination and the only result is somebody gets a bad picture in their Instagram feed. We’re talking about actual science.
We’ve demonstrated that AI agents in Luma can make recommendations on what your next step could be in an experimental process. But you still need scientists to have critical thinking and make the next step toward discovery. I don’t think we’re quite at the stage where agents can do that alone.
The Siemens Acquisition
Q: What was your take on the acquisition both strategically, for the business, and for you personally?
Brian: There were a few things in the acquisition process that were like — check, check, check. We were being acquired by a software company, a company that understands software and software people. Check. We were being acquired by a company with assets in life sciences that will allow us to expand our own mission. Check.
And then the third one, for me, is a very personal connection around sustainability and trying to make the world a better place. Our own mission at Dotmatics is to accelerate innovation to make the world a cleaner, healthier, safer place to live. It’s so in tune with what Siemens does. This is great. Another check.
Q: And in practical terms, what might being part of Siemens unlock for Dotmatics products and target markets?
Brian: On our own, we were really focused on the research portion of research, development and manufacturing in life sciences. As we’re now part of Siemens, there’s the potential for us to expand. Now, instead of just looking at research, we’re looking more broadly. It’s going to accelerate our growth, and it really just makes our mission a whole lot bigger.
Q: What’s an example of your software in action?
Brian: The example I keep coming back to is a major U.S. pharmaceutical company doing oncology R&D — the kind of work that’s pushing toward treatments for hard-to-treat cancers, including CAR-T cell therapies. Their scientists are working across traditional boundaries, collaborating across labs and sites, moving fast. What Luma does for a team like that is keep the whole research process connected so that the work scientists do at each stage actually carries forward into the next. That continuity is what lets discovery accelerate. That’s what we’re built for.
Another one I come back to is cassava. It’s a huge crop in Africa, but it’s under threat from viruses and climate change. There’s a project, the Cassava Virus Action Project (CVAP), in which scientists specifically use our Geneious Prime product to do gene sequencing in the field. They get samples and do analysis of seeds to help develop stronger, more resilient plants for the future.
And I mean in the literal field in Sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers use a very small sequencing machine that can actually do that work, and then you need our software to interpret that data. All that can be done instantly, right there.
These are concrete examples of what our products are doing in the world. And I think it really aligns with what Siemens is trying to do broadly.
Cooking at the Eiffel Tower, and Tennis
Q: Your path to this role is — let’s say unconventional. Math at Harvard, management consulting, an MBA, marketing, finance, operations, data analysis, product management. And cooking school?
Brian: (Laughs.) It’s like a straight line, right? Yeah, I’ve had all the jobs. I don’t think there was a point where I said, “I want to be the CEO of a large software company.” But I’m here. And I think all of those things help me navigate what I see in our company and in working with other people. Even going to cooking school was very helpful to my current job today.
Q: So should we call you a chef?
Brian: I was never a chef at a restaurant. But I spent a couple of years cooking, and it was great. I was a stagiaire — a culinary intern — at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which was pretty crazy. Four months in a very, very small kitchen. As you can imagine, real estate in the Eiffel Tower on the second deck is at a premium. So, the kitchen is really small, and the dining room is really big.
Q: What’s your go-to dish?
Brian: Go-to for a party is paella. It’s easy, feeds a crowd, looks great when it comes out. You can get it started and then get back and talk to people, instead of being cordoned off in the kitchen. I design meals around being able to spend more of my time with my friends.
Q: Outside the kitchen?
Brian: Tennis. I’m not that good, but tennis is one of the things in my life during which, when I’m playing, I’m not thinking about anything else. There is literally a ball coming at you very, very quickly that you have to deal with. If you think about work all the time, you need something that gets your mind off it. Tennis is extremely effective in doing that for me.
Q: Anything else?
Brian: I guess I’ll say what I always do, which is: if you need something or want to talk, just reach out. Although it’s a little scary saying that now we’re part of the much larger Siemens’ world. Just think of a good question or two first.
Dotmatics is a Siemens Digital Industries Software company. Learn more about the acquisition here and here.
