Omen AI’s plan to optimize data centers is underway

The AI-driven demand for computing power has data centers looking to put more pressure on each GPU rack. One result? Bacteria outbreak.

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

Omen Amnesty International He has the solution: a small spectrometer that can monitor the health of liquids in real time, detecting bacterial growth before it becomes a major problem. “You don’t risk very long downtimes because you have no idea what’s going on chemically,” explains Zach LaBerge, CEO and founder.

Today, Omen AI said it has raised a $31 million Series A funding 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, raised $3 million installing sensors on construction equipment and eventually dropped out of high school. (His mother and father, a former Ontario education minister, were supportive of his plan to make his own way.)

After shutting down that startup, Laberge started Omen in 2024, with the idea of ​​focusing on fluid systems because they are key to enabling construction machines that are smart enough to know when they need repair. The idea was to replace the time-consuming process of extracting samples and sending them to the laboratory with real-time awareness. Besides bacterial growth, the device can detect pump corrosion if it sees copper or chromium, or seals if it sees silicone.

Caterpillar dealers were one of the first major customers for Omen’s heavy vehicle business, but Cat is also a major supplier of gas turbines and generators to provide on-premises power to data centers. It didn’t take long for Omen to see where the wind was blowing.

“That was kind of transformational,” LaBerge told TechCrunch. About six months ago, “a lot of agents were saying, ‘Hey, we’re starting to put sensors on our turbines, can you guys do anything in terms of construction?’

Ohmen discovered that these buildings are filled with fluids, from HVAC systems to cooling chips. After discovering a new, rapidly growing pool of potential customers, Omen began focusing on data centers.

“It’s rare to see such a young founder command the respect of large, established companies in an industry that’s moving a little slower,” said Corey Rellas, partner at Nava Ventures and Omen board member. “For Omen in particular, a lot of our diligence came from our introductions to large customers which quickly validated their approach.”

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

“The fluid passing through these massive systems is a critical variable that most of the industry ignores,” Piotr Tomasik, president of TensorWave, 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 sending fluid samples to labs for information, Omen isn’t alone in developing local analytics — Pyxis, an established water monitoring company, has introduced its own data center chiller Monitoring product Earlier this month.

The major technical developments that have opened up this approach are recent improvements in both optical technologies and signal processing software. “The hardware is cheap enough that it makes sense to play on a large scale, and then signal processing allows us to tease out the noise more logically,” LaBerge said.