Empirik launches with $21M for predictive infrastructure operations
Empirik, a Sequoia Capital-incubated startup, has spun out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi and Alumni Ventures. The company is building an AI-driven infrastructure tool intended to predict outages before they occur by tracking system changes and assessing their effects across an environment.
The startup was incubated by Sequoia in 2023 and formally launched earlier this year. Sequoia subsequently recruited Kartik Chandrayana, formerly chief product officer at Quantum Metric and vice president of observability at Salesforce, as Empirik’s chief executive.
From incident response to change-risk assessment
Empirik was conceived by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, two former Sequoia IT leaders. Before joining Sequoia as chief digital and information officer in 2020, Puri had spent more than a decade leading infrastructure work at Rubrik and VMware. As large language models matured, the founders identified an opportunity to apply AI to a persistent operational problem: preventing failures rather than only diagnosing them after services are disrupted.
The product follows changes made across infrastructure and infers their potential ripple effects through interconnected systems. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said conventional observability products often struggle to understand complex dependencies across those systems. Empirik is positioned as a dedicated layer for following changes throughout large environments.
Its operational model resembles an autonomous traffic controller. Empirik can permit changes deemed low risk, apply guardrails to larger changes and flag the most dangerous updates for human review. The company says this approach can take routine troubleshooting work away from DevOps and site reliability engineering teams, allowing them to focus on higher-value priorities.
Customers and an expanding AI operations market
Since its launch earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 companies. Named users include S&P Global and Guardant Health, alongside an unnamed consumer packaged goods company.
Chandrayana links the company’s timing to the faster pace of software delivery enabled by AI. Empirik’s stated ambition is to automate selected infrastructure-engineering tasks in the way tools such as Cursor and Claude Code have automated parts of software development. The company describes its offering as complementary to AI SRE platforms including Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.
What infrastructure leaders should evaluate
For businesses operating complex platforms, the practical question is whether a tool can reliably map dependencies, classify change risk and preserve appropriate human control over critical updates. Teams evaluating predictive operations platforms should test those capabilities against their own change processes, incident history and review requirements before delegating routine operational decisions.