Zach Laberge

Zach Laberge grew up in Halifax and started his first company, Frenter, at 14 as a basic rental marketplace that slowly evolved into heavy equipment telematics and an operating system for rental fleets. He dropped out of high school in his mid teens to run it full time and learned how to sell into construction yards, not YC demo days, by walking lots, working trade show floors, and cold emailing operators who did not care about his age.

By 18 he had raised millions for Frenter led by 1517 Fund and CDL affiliated investors and had a live but brutally difficult construction SaaS and hardware business on his hands. Shutting Frenter down at 18 forced him to inventory what had actually worked: embedding sensors into real world machines, selling ROI not hype to old school buyers, and using every customer conversation as a wedge into a denser network of owners, OEM executives, and niche investors who understood physical infrastructure.

Omen AI started in 2024 as another industrial sensor play, originally aimed at excavators and heavy equipment before Zach realized the same fluid monitoring stack was orders of magnitude more valuable for AI data centers and critical industrial machines. Instead of lab based sampling, Omen installs spectroscopic sensors directly in coolant and lubricants, streaming data on contamination, metal wear, and bacterial growth so operators can treat it like a blood test for their hardware and avoid shutdowns that burn millions in GPU time.

When he pivoted Omen into AI data centers, the investor and customer stack changed too. CRV led a $10.5M seed around the real time fluid intelligence story, Nava Ventures later led a $31M Series A that included both debt and equity, and backers now range from Sheryl Sandberg to executives from Bridgestone, GM, Johnson Controls, and TensorWave. Zach has done all of this without a co founder, often literally pitching from closets and back rooms at conferences, and he keeps using the same playbook he refined at Frenter: show hard dollar value on the first slide, demo a working sensor in the second, and end with a map of exactly which plants or data halls he can already reach.

1. Start in the dirtiest corner of the market and get un-ignorable proof. With Frenter he lived inside equipment yards and rental offices until he could speak in the operators language and measure uptime, utilization, and repair costs in their own numbers. That made it trivial later to explain Omen as the same thing but for fluids in higher value machines, so investors and data center leaders could see the jump in ROI while still trusting his domain intuition.

2. Use cold channels to manufacture warm rooms. Zach treated cold emails, LinkedIn DMs, and even trade show badge scans as a system, not a wish, by tracking who opened, who walked booths, and who forwarded his decks, then circling back with tailored updates that turned strangers into advisors and eventually lead investors. By the time he went out for the Omen seed round, many of the funds already knew him as the teenage founder who raised millions from a broom closet pitch and kept shipping in construction, which dramatically collapsed fundraising cycles.

3. Sell the outage, not the AI. Instead of leaning on generative AI buzzwords, he framed Omen AI around catastrophic events that CFOs and plant managers already lose sleep over, like unplanned downtime that idles an entire GPU cluster or shuts a factory line. Every deck, podcast, and press hit focused on a single outcome, averted multimillion dollar cooling or fluid failures, then worked backward into sensors, models, and data, which turned enterprise prospects into urgent buyers and gave investors a simple, memorable mental model.