Omen AI’s data center optimization plan draws sharp criticism

The surging demand for AI computing power is pushing data centers to maximize every rack of GPUs. One unintended side effect? Bacterial contamination.

The coolant used for liquid-cooled chips is a mixture of water and a biocide. To run chips at higher temperatures, operators adjust the ratio to include more water—better at absorbing heat, but also more prone to microbial growth that clogs the system. Fixing that means flushing the loop, which can idle a rack for five or six hours, potentially costing millions of dollars.

Omen AI offers an alternative: a tiny spectrometer that monitors coolant quality in real time, catching bacterial growth before it becomes a major crisis. “You’re not risking massive downtime because you have no visibility into the chemistry,” says founder and CEO Zach Laberge.

Today, Omen AI announced a $31 million Series A round led by Nava Ventures, with participation from CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, Hard Launch Capital, and personal investments from executives at Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and Tensorwave.

Laberge started his first company in 2020 at age 14, raising $3 million to embed sensors in construction equipment—and eventually dropping out of high school. (His parents, including his mother, a former Ontario Minister of Education, supported his decision to forge his own path.)

After that startup shut down, Laberge launched Omen in 2024, focusing on fluid systems as the key to making construction machinery smart enough to know when it needs repair. The idea was to replace the slow process of extracting samples and sending them to a lab with real-time awareness. Beyond detecting bacterial growth, the device can spot pump wear if it picks up copper or chromium, and seal degradation if it detects silicon.

Caterpillar dealerships were an early customer for Omen’s heavy-vehicle business, but Cat is also a major supplier of gas-powered turbines and generators for on-site data center power. It didn’t take long for Omen to see where the industry was heading.

“That was kind of the turning point,” Laberge told TechCrunch. About six months ago, “many dealerships started saying, ‘Hey, we’re putting sensors on our turbines—can you help with the building side?’”

Omen realized those buildings are full of fluid, from HVAC systems to chip cooling. Spotting a fast-growing customer base, the company shifted focus to data centers.

“It’s rare to see a founder so young who commands the respect of large, established companies in a slow-moving industry,” said Cory Rellas, a partner at Nava Ventures who sits on Omen’s board. “For Omen, much of our due diligence came through introductions with major customers that quickly validated their approach.”

Omen, which has raised $40 million since its 2024 founding, is now working with a dozen data center customers to build out its offering—including TensorWave, a company creating 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 as we do: better monitoring to optimally support compute customers.”

While many organizations still mail fluid samples to labs, Omen isn’t the only player pursuing on-site analytics—Pyxis, an established water-monitoring firm, launched its own data center coolant monitoring product earlier this month.

The key technological breakthroughs that made this approach possible are recent advances in both optical hardware and signal-processing software. “Hardware is now cheap enough that scaling makes sense, and signal processing lets us extract more meaning from the noise,” Laberge said.