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

Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, announced Tuesday that it has raised $21 million in seed funding to launch its AI-powered platform that predicts IT outages before they occur. The company, now independent, aims to help infrastructure engineers prevent system failures by analyzing changes and their potential ripple effects across complex environments.

From IT veterans to AI-driven observability

Avon Puri, who spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia as chief digital and information officer in 2020, teamed up with Sudheer Dhurjati, another Sequoia IT leader, to address a persistent challenge: reactive troubleshooting. Three years ago, as large language models advanced, they saw an opportunity to build a tool that could autonomously predict and prevent outages. Their insight led to the creation of Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential impact across the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia recognized Empirik as a new type of observability tool, distinct from traditional monitoring solutions that often fail to understand complex system dependencies. To lead the spinout, Sequoia recruited Kartik Chandrayana, former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP, as CEO earlier this year.

How Empirik works

Empirik acts as an autonomous “traffic cop” for infrastructure changes, according to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky. It permits low-risk changes automatically, sets guardrails on larger ones, and flags the most dangerous updates for human review. By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities.

“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Balkansky told Bitcoin World. “Most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies.” Empirik aims to fill that gap.

Early adoption and market positioning

Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already onboarded customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. The company’s goal, as Chandrayana put it, is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work significantly faster.

“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” Chandrayana said. As AI accelerates software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are becoming increasingly vital.

Competition and differentiation

Balkansky claims Empirik is currently in a category of its own, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. While these platforms focus on incident response, Empirik emphasizes prediction and prevention, potentially reducing downtime and operational costs.

Conclusion

Empirik’s launch with $21M in seed funding underscores a growing trend: applying AI to infrastructure reliability. With a strong founding team, early enterprise adoption, and backing from prominent investors, Empirik is positioned to address a critical pain point in IT operations. As AI continues to transform software development, tools that ensure system stability will be essential for businesses relying on complex digital infrastructure.

FAQs

Q1: What does Empirik do?
Empirik is an AI-powered platform that predicts IT outages by tracking system changes and inferring their potential ripple effects across an organization’s infrastructure, allowing teams to prevent failures before they happen.

Q2: Who founded Empirik?
Empirik was incubated by Sequoia Capital, with initial work by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati. Kartik Chandrayana was recruited as CEO earlier this year to lead the company.

Q3: How is Empirik different from existing observability tools?
Most observability tools focus on monitoring and alerting after issues occur. Empirik proactively predicts potential failures by understanding complex system dependencies and autonomously managing change risk, acting as an “autonomous traffic cop” for infrastructure changes.