Omen AI Buys Aquatic Labs for $16 Million in Cash and Stock

Omen AI announced on November 2, 2026 that it acquired Aquatic Labs for $16 million in cash and stock, bringing the company’s team, intellectual property and sensor research into its work on automated cooling-fluid monitoring and treatment for AI data centers. Aquatic Labs founder Allan Adams will join Omen AI as chief science officer and lead research and development across its sensing technologies.

Omen AI’s Q4 2026 leadership roster lists Adams as chief science officer in Boston. Founder and CEO Zach Laberge said bringing Aquatic Labs’ team into Omen AI would allow the companies to build on its research and develop new sensors together. “To automate treatment, you first need enough information to understand what is happening in the fluid,” Laberge said. He said the combined work would move Omen AI toward cooling systems that can maintain their own fluid condition.

Omen AI’s approach moves fluid testing typically performed in a laboratory directly into data center cooling systems. Its sensors monitor fluid while equipment runs, helping operators identify changes between scheduled tests. Aquatic Labs’ technology measures total alkalinity, defined as the fluid’s ability to neutralize acid, in real time without adding chemicals for each test. Omen AI said those readings will complement its elemental analysis and biological monitoring and, combined with its other measurements, can help operators assess the potential for mineral buildup and corrosion.

“The same chemistry corals use to build reefs also causes scale buildup in coffee machines and fouls data center cooling loops,” Adams said. He said understanding cooling water also requires examining its biology, including microorganisms that can grow inside cooling systems.

Adams’ Aquatic Labs biography says he earned degrees in theoretical physics from Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford before joining the MIT faculty in 2008. He later started an MIT research group developing scalable tools for ocean exploration and conservation, became a visiting oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and developed sensors there for exploring the ocean’s twilight zone. He left MIT and Woods Hole to found Aquatic Labs.

Omen AI’s Sentry 1.2 product documentation lists pH, total alkalinity, glycol concentration, conductivity, temperature and pressure among its monitored parameters. The 4U rack-mounted unit connects to a cooling loop through two quick-disconnect couplings in a parallel bypass, leaving the primary flow untouched. It automatically draws fluid from the bypass and runs multi-channel analysis on each sample. Readings stream to Omen Cloud over MQTT and to a facility’s building-management system over Modbus TCP/IP. Each parameter is displayed beside its healthy band, and leaving the band opens an alert.

Omen AI expects to begin shipping products with the additional monitoring capabilities by the end of 2026. Its longer-term work on automated treatment would connect fluid analysis to equipment that can adjust coolant chemistry within approved limits and verify the results through continued monitoring. The goal is to reduce manual testing and intervention and help prevent costly downtime.

The announcement does not say how the consideration is divided between cash and stock.