Omen AI raises $31M to monitor data center fluid health

Omen AI, a startup focused on fluid system monitoring, has raised a $31 million Series A round—an early stage of venture capital funding. This brings the company’s total funding to $40 million since its founding in 2024. The round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from:

• Venture capital firms CRV and Hard Launch Capital
• Vanderbilt University
• Filtration company Mann+Hummel
• Investment firm Starhill Holdings
• Personal investments from executives at Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and TensorWave.

The funding comes as artificial intelligence workloads force data centers to squeeze more performance from their hardware. To keep up, operators are increasingly relying on liquid-cooled chips, a hardware cooling method that uses a mixture of water and chemical inhibitors. However, pushing these systems to their limits can lead to “bacterial outbreaks” and “nasty contamination” that clog fluid pathways. Resolving these issues requires flushing the system, which can force operators to shut down a rack for five or six hours, resulting in a potential cost of millions of dollars.

Omen AI addresses this by using a spectrometer—a device that analyzes fluid health—to monitor cooling systems in real time and spot bacterial growth before it escalates. “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 of Omen AI. Laberge founded his first company in 2020, raising $3 million to install sensors on equipment. After that startup shut down, he founded Omen in 2024 to focus on fluid systems for heavy machinery. Early customers included Caterpillar dealerships, but the company transitioned to data centers about six months ago after clients began asking for building-side fluid monitoring.

The company is currently working with a dozen data center customers, including TensorWave, an AI compute cloud provider. Piotr Tomasik, president of TensorWave, noted that the fluid running through these massive systems is a critical variable that most of the industry is flying blind on, adding that Omen AI offers better monitoring to optimally support compute customers. Cory Rellas, a partner at Nava Ventures who sits on Omen’s board, stated that much of their investment diligence came through introductions with large customers, which quickly validated the startup’s approach. Omen AI is not alone in targeting this niche; Pyxis, an established water-monitoring firm, rolled out its own data center coolant monitoring product earlier this month.

Why it matters

As data centers push hardware to the limit with liquid cooling, fluid health becomes a critical, often overlooked variable that can cause massive operational downtime.