Data centres are facing bacterial outbreaks in their cooling systems. The liquid used to chill chips is a mix of water and a bactericide. Managers can increase the water content to absorb more heat, but this invites contamination that clogs the flow. To fix it, they must flush the system. That often means shutting down a rack for five or six hours. The cost can reach millions of dollars.
Omen AI’s sensor
Omen AI has a solution. It uses a tiny spectrometer to monitor fluid health in real time. The device spots bacterial growth before it becomes a major problem.
“You’re not risking huge amounts of downtime because you have no insight into what’s going on chemically,” says Zach Laberge, CEO and founder.
Today, Omen AI announced a $31 million Series A round. Nava Ventures led the financing. CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, and Hard Launch Capital also participated. Executives from Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and Tensorwave made personal investments.
Laberge founded his first company in 2020. He was 14 years old. He raised $3 million to install sensors on construction equipment. He eventually dropped out of high school. His parents, one of whom was a former Minister of Education for Ontario, supported his plan.
After that startup shut down, Laberge started Omen in 2024. He focused on fluid systems. These systems are key to making construction machinery smart enough to know when repairs are needed. The goal 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 detects wear. It spots pumps wearing out if it sees copper or chromium. It identifies failing seals if it detects silicon.
Caterpillar dealerships were key early customers for Omen’s heavy vehicles business. Caterpillar also supplies gas-powered turbines and generators to provide on-premises power for data centres. It did not take long for Omen to see where the market was moving.
“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. This ranges from HVAC systems to chip cooling. Spotting a new group of potential customers, Omen began to focus on data centres.
“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,” says Cory Rellas. He is a partner at Nava Ventures and 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 has raised $40 million since its founding in 2024. It works with a dozen data centre customers as it builds its offering. TensorWave is one partner. The company builds 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,” says Piotr Tomasik, president of TensorWave. “Omen [sees] the future of infrastructure exactly the way we do, better monitoring to optimally support compute customers.”
While many organisations rely on mailing fluid samples to labs for insight, Omen is not alone in developing on-premises analytics. Pyxis, an established water-monitoring firm, rolled out its data centre coolant monitoring product earlier this month.
The key tech advances that enabled this approach are recent improvements in 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.
