Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages

Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began showing their potential, Puri and fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati saw an opening: use AI to help infrastructure engineers prevent outages before they happen, rather than react to them after the fact. That idea became Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across an entire infrastructure stack.

Sequoia incubated the startup in 2023, viewing it as a new kind of observability tool that could help prevent and resolve incidents rather than just report on them. Earlier this year, Sequoia recruited Kartik Chandrayana — a former Quantum Metric chief product officer and Salesforce observability vice president — as CEO. Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company, having raised $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. He said Empirik is among the first tools dedicated to tracking changes across massive environments, acting as an autonomous “traffic cop” that permits low-risk changes, sets guardrails on larger ones, and flags the most dangerous updates for human review.

By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik is meant to let busy DevOps and site-reliability engineering teams offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value work. Since launching earlier this year, the company has already signed customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 companies, including Guardant Health and a major consumer packaged goods company.

“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” Chandrayana said, framing the company’s ambition as doing for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers — automating tasks so they can move faster. As AI accelerates the pace of software development, he told TechCrunch, tools that help infrastructure teams keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever.

On competition, Balkansky said Empirik is in a category of its own for now, positioning it as a complementary layer to AI site-reliability-engineering platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.

Why it matters

Empirik is part of a widening push to apply agentic AI to infrastructure operations, not just software development — a shift that could reshape how DevOps and SRE teams are staffed as system complexity keeps outpacing manual oversight.