Omen AI raised a $31 million Series A to watch what is growing inside data center coolant loops, TechCrunch reported. Nava Ventures led the round, with CRV participating, and total funding now reaches $40 million since the 2024 founding. Founder and CEO Zach Laberge built the company around a single failure mode that liquid cooling created and rarely measures.
Direct-to-chip cooling moves heat with a working fluid pressed against the die. Operators raise the water content in that coolant to absorb more heat per pass. Higher water content feeds bacteria, and the bacteria foul the loop. When the loop fouls, the system goes down for five or six hours, and Omen puts the cost of a single incident in the millions of dollars.
That tradeoff sits next to the one operators already wrestle with on the supply side, where water and power pull against each other across the whole site. Coolant chemistry is the same problem in miniature, measured at the rack instead of the cooling tower.
Omen deploys a spectrometer that reads coolant chemistry in real time and flags bacterial growth early. The pitch is fluid health monitoring sold on top of liquid cooling infrastructure, an instrument layer for loops that mostly run unwatched. Cory Rellas of Nava Ventures sits on the board behind that bet.
The customer list reaches past data centers into heavy industry: Caterpillar, Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and Mann+Hummel all appear among named customers and partners. Each runs fluid systems where contamination carries a hard cost, which gives Omen a fouling dataset wider than any single hyperscaler could supply.
As rack density forces liquid cooling from option to requirement, the loop becomes a piece of uptime infrastructure that needs its own telemetry. The unmeasured gap is biological, and it scales with every gallon of water operators add to chase better heat absorption. The same pressure shows up in the flow-balancing problem inside direct-to-chip manifolds, where small failures compound fast. Omen is selling the gauge for a loop the industry has been running blind. Procurement teams specifying CDUs and cold plates now have a fluid-monitoring line item to weigh against five or six hours of dark racks.