Omen AI’s plan to optimize data centers is all wet

The AI-driven demand for compute power has data centers looking to squeeze more from every rack of GPUs. One consequence? Bacterial outbreaks.

The liquid for liquid-cooled chips is a mixture of water and a substance that inhibits bacteria growth. To run the chips hotter, data center managers can change the mix to include more water, which absorbs heat better, but leads to nasty contamination that clogs the flow. To solve that, they flush the system, which can mean shutting down a rack for five or six hours at a potential cost of millions of dollars.

Omen AI has a solution: A tiny spectrometer that can monitor that fluid health in real time, spotting bacterial growth before it becomes a massive problem. “You’re not risking huge amounts of downtime because you have no insight into what’s going on chemically,” explains CEO and founder Zach Laberge.

Today, Omen AI said it raised a $31 million Series A round, led by Nava Ventures and including participation from CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, and Hard Launch Capital, as well as personal investments from executives at Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and TensorWave.

Laberge founded his first company in 2020 when he was 14, raising $3 million to install sensors on construction equipment and ultimately dropping out of high school. (His father and mother, a former Minister of Education for Ontario, were supportive of his plan to carve his own path.)

After that startup shut down, Laberge started Omen in 2024, with the idea of focusing on fluid systems as the key to enabling construction machinery to be smart enough to know when it needed to be fixed. The idea was to replace the time-consuming process of extracting samples and sending them to a lab with real-time awareness. Besides bacterial growth, the device can spot pumps and pumps wearing out if it sees copper or chromium, or seals if it sees silicon.

Caterpillar dealerships were a key early customer for Omen’s heavy vehicles business, but Cat is also a major supplier of gas-powered turbines and generators to provide on-premises power for data centers. It didn’t take long for Omen to see where the wind was blowing.

“That was kind of the transition,” Laberge told TechCrunch. About six months ago, “a lot of the dealerships were saying, ‘Hey, we’re starting to put sensors on our turbines, can you guys do anything on the building side of things?’”

Omen discovered that those buildings are full of fluid, from their HVAC systems to their chip cooling. Spotting a new, fast-growing group of potential customers, Omen began to focus on data centers.

“It’s rare to see such a young founder who has the respect of established, large corporations in a space that moves a bit more slowly,” said Cory Rellas, a partner at Nava Ventures who sits on Omen’s board. “For Omen in particular, much of our diligence came through our introductions with large customers which quickly validated their approach.”

Omen, which has raised $40 million since its founding in 2024, is working with a dozen data center customers as they build out their offering, including TensorWave, a company building an AI compute cloud on AMD chips.

“The fluid running through these massive systems is a critical variable that most of the industry is flying blind on,” Piotr Tomasik, TensorWave’s president, said in a statement. “Omen [sees] the future of infrastructure exactly the way we do, better monitoring to optimally support compute customers.”

While many organizations rely on mailing fluid samples to labs for insight, Omen isn’t alone in developing on-premises analytics — Pyxis, an established water-monitoring firm, rolled out its data center coolant monitoring product earlier this month.

The key tech advances that unlocked this approach are recent improvements in both optical technologies and signal processing software. “Hardware is just cheap enough that it makes sense to play at scale, and then signal processing lets us make more sense out of the noise,” Laberge said.