The surging demand for computing power driven by artificial intelligence is pushing data centers to maximize the output of every rack of GPUs. One unexpected consequence? Bacterial outbreaks. The coolant used in liquid-cooled chips is a blend of water and an anti-microbial agent. To operate chips at higher temperatures, data center operators can adjust the mixture to contain more water, which is better at absorbing heat. However, this change invites stubborn contamination that clogs the cooling flow. To fix the problem, they must flush the system, which can require shutting down a rack for five or six hours—potentially costing millions of dollars.

Omen AI has developed a solution: a tiny spectrometer that monitors the health of the coolant in real time, detecting bacterial growth before it escalates into a major crisis. “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 announced it raised 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 founded his first company in 2020 at age 14, raising $3 million to install sensors on construction equipment, and eventually dropped out of high school. (His father and mother, a former Minister of Education for Ontario, 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 needed repairs. The goal was to replace the time-consuming process of extracting samples and sending them to a lab with real-time awareness. Beyond bacterial growth, the device can detect when pumps are wearing out by spotting copper or chromium, or when seals are failing by detecting silicon. Caterpillar dealerships were an early key customer for Omen’s heavy vehicles business, but Cat also supplies gas-powered turbines and generators for on-premises data center power. It didn’t take long for Omen to see where the wind was blowing. 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 filled with fluid, from HVAC systems to chip cooling. Spotting a fast-growing group of potential customers, Omen began focusing 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 it builds out its 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 analysis, Omen isn’t alone in developing on-premises analytics—Pyxis, an established water-monitoring firm, launched its data center coolant monitoring product earlier this month. The key technological 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.