Omen AI adds liquid know-how in $16 million Aquatic Labs acquisition

US data centers use 17 to 19 billion gallons of water to cool their hot-running chips each year — and that number is expected to to triple in the next five years, according to the Water Foundation.

That’s an expensive and politically tricky proposition for investors throwing billions of dollars at the challenge of scaling up AI. One way to use less water is to do a better job monitoring the cooling fluids, a task that currently involves sending samples away to a laboratory for tests in a multi-day process.

Omen AI was founded in 2024 to solve that problem. The company is building a real-time sensor to determine whether valves were failing, or if bacteria growth in the system threatened to choke off water flow. After raising a $31 million Series A in June, Omen is now acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal.

The deal came together after Omen founder Zach Laberge was introduced to Aquatic Labs’ CEO Allan Adams by an investor in the filtration space. Both startups were building real-time water sensors with complementary technology: Omen’s sensors looked for elements in the water, while the Aquatic Labs sensor tests its alkalinity.

Putting those two technologies in the same sensor creates a “much richer picture of the water and the fluid,” Adams told TechCrunch, while uniting their vision of automating what had previously been a slow, manual process.

The combination unites two classic species of founder: Laberge dropped out of college to pursue his first company, which did similar fluid analysis for large construction machines that depend on hydraulics. Adams was an academic, trained as a physicist, who spent much of his career developing advanced ocean sensing technology as an MIT professor and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher before starting his company.

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