Omen AI, a San Francisco startup that reads the health of machines through their fluids, has raised a $31 million Series A led by Nava Ventures. The round brings total funding to $41.5 million and points venture money at an unglamorous but fast-growing corner of the AI boom: keeping physical infrastructure from failing.
Watching the water inside AI
As AI pushes data centers toward liquid cooling at massive scale, coolant contamination, wear and degradation become expensive risks. Omen's spectroscopic sensors attach directly to a machine's fluid system and continuously analyze metal content, bio-contaminants, wear patterns and fluid breakdown in real time, replacing blunt quarterly lab tests with constant monitoring. The company says its systems already cover data centers managing 10 to 14 gigawatts of capacity, plus industrial fleets across North America.
Predictive maintenance becomes must-have
Once data-center uptime becomes the gating factor for AI economics, predictive maintenance stops being optional. Omen is effectively digitizing machine health in environments where downtime is costly and scheduled testing is too coarse. That framing helped attract a deep investor list beyond Nava Ventures, including CRV, LMNT Ventures, Mann+Hummel, Borusan Ventures, Starhill Holdings and Hard Launch Capital, along with executives from Bridgestone, GM and Johnson Controls.
The widening surface of AI infrastructure
Omen's round shows how the investable ground around compute keeps expanding, from chips to cooling, fluids, redundancy and maintenance. Founded in 2024 by 20-year-old CEO Zach Laberge, the company is targeting a market McKinsey expects to nearly double to 200 GW of data-center capacity by 2030. The financing sits alongside other infrastructure bets like custom data-center CPUs, silicon timing from Stathera and surging AI memory demand.
Reporting based on coverage from Omen AI (PR Newswire), SiliconANGLE and TechCrunch.