Omen AI raises $31M to monitor water in AI data centers and prevent costly outages

Omen AI, a startup that monitors the chemistry of liquid coolant in data centers, raised a $31 million Series A on June 29. The company uses optical sensors to detect bacterial contamination before it forces a rack offline.

The round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from CRV, Vanderbilt University, Mann+Hummel, Starhill Holdings, Hard Launch Capital, and executives from Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and Tensorwave.

How Omen's spectrometer prevents costly downtime

Liquid cooling systems circulate a mixture of water and an antibacterial additive. Operators can increase the water ratio to absorb more heat, but a wetter mix also invites bacteria. When contamination clogs a system, the fix requires a full flush: five or six hours of downtime that can cost millions of dollars in lost compute.

Omen's answer is a small spectrometer that reads the fluid's health continuously. It alerts operators to chemical changes long before a flush becomes necessary. CEO Zach Laberge told TechCrunch that the device gives operators insight they previously flew without.

Key facts about Omen's business:

• Works with roughly a dozen data center customers, including Tensorwave, which is building an AMD-based AI compute cloud.
• Founded in 2024, originally focused on fluid monitoring for heavy machinery. Laberge started his first company at age 14 and dropped out of high school to run it.
• The pivot to data centers came through Caterpillar dealerships, which supplied turbines and generators to data centers and asked Omen to monitor building fluids as well.

The coolant monitoring race heats up with liquid cooling

Omen enters a market that is growing quickly. Rack densities have surpassed what air cooling can handle, and operators are retrofitting facilities with liquid cooling. Iceotope, a liquid cooling firm, raised $26 million as part of that shift. Pyxis, an established water monitoring company, rolled out its own data center coolant product earlier in the same month.

Laberge argues that Omen's timing and technology set it apart. Optical hardware has become cheap enough to deploy at scale, and signal processing can now make sense of the readings in real time. The company's bet is that fluid chemistry is a critical variable most of the industry still ignores. If Omen's sensors can prevent even one major flush per facility, the savings will justify the subscription cost many times over.