Omen AI raises $31M to solve bacterial contamination problem in data center cooling systems

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, 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 they key to enabling construction machinery 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 generator 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.

Omen AI raises $31m to watch the water inside AI data centres

The unglamorous truth about the AI boom is that some of its hardest problems are plumbing. As data centres pack more GPUs into every rack and run them hotter, the fluid that keeps the chips from cooking has started, occasionally, to grow bacteria. That is the problem Omen AI has built a company around, and on 29 June it said it had raised a $31m Series A to chase it. The round was led by Nava Ventures, with CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, and Hard Launch Capital taking part, alongside personal cheques from executives at Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and Tensorwave. The mechanics are oddly specific. Liquid-cooled chips run on a mix of water and an additive that suppresses bacteria. To push the chips harder, operators can dial up the water, which absorbs heat better, but a wetter mix invites contamination that clogs the flow. The fix, once it goes wrong, is to flush the system, which can mean taking a rack offline for five or six hours at a cost that runs into the millions. Omen's answer is a small spectrometer that reads the fluid's health continuously and flags trouble before it becomes a flush. "You're not risking huge amounts of downtime because you have no insight into what's going on chemically," chief executive and founder Zach Laberge told TechCrunch. Laberge is an unusual founder for an infrastructure company. He started his first business in 2020 at 14, raised $3m to put sensors on construction equipment, and dropped out of high school to run it, with the backing of his parents, one of whom was a former Ontario education minister. After that company shut down, he started Omen in 2024, originally aimed at fluid systems in heavy machinery: the same idea of replacing lab samples with real-time readings, applied to engines rather than servers. The pivot to data centres came through the back door. Caterpillar dealerships were early customers for the machinery business, and Caterpillar also supplies the turbines and generators that power data centres on site. About six months ago, Laberge said, those dealers started asking whether Omen could monitor the buildings too. The buildings, it turned out, were full of fluid, from HVAC systems to chip cooling, and a fast-growing customer base came with them. Omen is now working with about a dozen data-centre customers, including Tensorwave, which is building an AI compute cloud on AMD chips. The bet riding underneath the round is the same one driving every cooling startup: that liquid cooling is no longer optional. Rack densities have climbed past what air can handle, the same threshold that drew $26m into the liquid-cooling firm Iceotope as operators scramble to retrofit. Omen is not alone in trying to bring fluid analysis out of the lab. Pyxis, an established water-monitoring company, rolled out its own data-centre coolant product earlier in the month, and the broader category is crowding fast as the environmental cost of water-hungry data centres draws regulatory attention. What Laberge argues sets Omen apart is timing: optical hardware has become cheap enough to deploy at scale, and signal processing good enough to make sense of the readings. It is a small device addressing a small-sounding problem, monitoring the chemistry of coolant, that happens to sit directly in the path of the most expensive build-out in computing. The fluid running through these systems, as one customer put it, is a critical variable most of the industry is still flying blind on.

Omen AI raises $31M to help data centers avoid costly downtime with continuous liquid coolant monitoring

Omen AI raises $31M to help data centers avoid costly downtime with continuous liquid coolant monitoring Data center coolant monitoring startup Omen AI Inc. is trying to fix one of the most pressing, yet little-known challenges in the artificial intelligence industry after raising $31 million in Series A funding today. The round was led by Nava Ventures and saw participation from CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings and Hard Launch Capital. Executives from Bridgestone Inc., TensorWave Inc. and General Motors Co. also invested in the round. The problem Omen AI is trying to tackle involves bacteria, which surprisingly, can cause significant problems for liquid-cooled AI chips. As data centers try to squeeze more and more graphics processing units into each rack to boost cluster sizes, those chips run increasingly hotter. But the fluid that's used to prevent those chips from cooking becomes more welcoming to bacteria the hotter those chips become. In an interview with TechCrunch, Omen AI founder and Chief Executive Zach Laberge explained that data centers use a liquid coolant that's made up of water and an additive that's meant to suppress the growth of bacteria. However, sometimes it's necessary to add a bit more water to that mixture so that the chips can be pushed even harder. More water allows the liquid to absorb more heat, but the wetter the mix is, the more likely it is to become contaminated - not only with bacteria, but also with tiny, sometimes even microscopic pieces of metal and other particles. The problem is that these can eventually prevent the liquid from flowing through the system as it should. The standard fix is to occasionally flush the system, dump the coolant and replace it with a fresh mix. But doing this means taking an entire rack of servers offline for five or six hours at a time, which can cost data center operators millions of dollars. Omen AI offers an alternative with a system that can continuously monitor the health of the coolant and spot problems with it before a flush becomes necessary. "You're not risking huge amounts of downtime because you have no insight into what's going on chemically," Laberge explained. At just 21 years old, Laberge is an incredibly young age for an infrastructure company founder. But he doesn't lack experience. He founded his first business in 2020 while still aged 14, raising $3 million to integrate sensors with construction machinery so those machines could be better maintained. Laberge soon dropped out of school to run that company, with the full backing of his parents. He started Omen in 2024, and originally targeted the same industry with the idea of building a system that could monitor the fluid in their pneumatics, so that operators don't have to constantly take samples and send them to a laboratory for analysis. One of Omen's customers is the construction and mining equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc., which also supplies turbines and generators for on-site power generation at data centers. When the AI boom sparked a massive data center buildout across the world, some of Caterpillar's dealers became heavily involved in those construction projects, and eventually asked Omen if it's also possible for them to monitor the buildings, too. That was when Laberge realized that data centers were so reliant on fluid, in everything from their HVAC systems to the chip cooling systems. "Taking a sample, shipping it to a lab, and waiting days for results is dangerously inadequate when you're protecting billions in GPU infrastructure and operating industrial machines," he said. "Omen AI was built to prevent catastrophic failure. We help data centers push their hardware to the absolute limit, unlocking compute performance operators didn't know they had." The company now has around a dozen data center operators as customers on its books, including Tensorwave, the neocloud that focuses exclusively on Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s GPUs. Those customers can choose between rigging up a permanent sensor array that connects directly to a server rack's fluid system to continuously track metal content, bio contamination and wear patterns, or a portable diagnostic unit that can be brought to any machine for an immediate diagnosis. In both cases, they monitor coolant for more than 21 elemental signatures, replacing the old "sample-and-wait" model with continuous, real-time intelligence. For Omen AI, this is a growing market. AI data center rack densities have increased well beyond what air-based cooling system can handle, which is why investors are increasingly looking to fund startups that can enhance the efficiency of liquid cooling systems. That's why Iceotope was able to raise $26 million in Series B funding in May. Omen AI faces another, more direct competitor in Pyxis Lab Inc., which last month launched its own coolant chemistry monitoring system. Cory Rellas of Nava Ventures said he's betting on Omen AI because the cost of unplanned failures in data centers can be staggering, running into tens of millions of dollars. "Despite the high stakes, these systems are still monitored with lab tests that take days," Rellas said. "Omen AI built the solution: continuous, real-time visibility into the health of the machines doing the world's most critical work."