Zach Laberge started his first company at 14, raised $3 million, then shut it down and pivoted. His parents—including a former Ontario Minister of Education—backed his decision to skip high school. Now, the 20-year-old's latest venture, Omen AI, just announced a $31 million Series A round.
The problem Omen tackles is bacterial contamination in data center cooling systems. As AI demand drives up chip temperatures, data centers pump more water into cooling fluids. More water improves heat absorption but invites bacterial growth that clogs the system. Clearing a contaminated line requires shutting down entire server racks for 5-6 hours—a cost that runs into millions of dollars.
Omen's solution is a small spectrometer that monitors coolant fluid in real time, detecting bacterial growth before it cascades into failure. "You're not risking huge amounts of downtime because you have no insight into what's going on chemically," Laberge said.
Nava Ventures led the $31 million round, with backing from CRV, Vanderbilt University, and executives at Bridgestone, GM, and Johnson Controls. Laberge founded Omen in 2024 to monitor heavy machinery. When Caterpillar dealerships asked whether the company could track data center fluids, he saw the opening and shifted focus.
"About six months ago, dealerships were saying, 'Hey, we're putting sensors on turbines—can you do anything on the building side?'" Laberge told TechCrunch. Omen found that data centers rely on fluid systems throughout—HVAC, chip cooling, the full infrastructure. As crypto miners and AI labs scale rapidly, maintaining server farms has become a pressing concern.
A high school dropout is now solving million-dollar data center problems with spectrometry.
