Startup Empirik raised 21 million dollars for a tool to autonomously predict infrastructure outages

Startup Empirik has become an independent company after three years of development in an incubator at Sequoia Capital. It raised 21 million dollars in a seed round from Sequoia Capital, Canapi and Alumni Ventures. The project was initiated by Avon Puri, previously a longtime infrastructure manager at Rubrik and VMware and now chief digital and information officer at Sequoia, and Sudheer Dhurjati. Kartik Chandrayana, previously vice president of observability at Salesforce and chief product officer at Quantum Metric, became the new CEO this year.

The tool from Empirik monitors changes in systems and estimates their potential impact across the entire infrastructure. According to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky, it acts as an autonomous “traffic cop” – allowing low-risk changes, setting guardrails for larger ones and flagging the most dangerous modifications for human review. Balkansky says that most existing observability tools cannot capture complex dependencies between systems and that Empirik is among the first tools focused specifically on monitoring changes in large-scale environments.

Since its launch, Empirik has gained customers ranging from smaller businesses to several Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health and one larger company in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector. According to CEO Chandrayana, the company aims to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code have done for software developers – automate tasks and speed up work. Sequoia says that Empirik currently has no direct competition and serves as an additional layer alongside AI SRE platforms such as Resolve or Traversal, in which Sequoia has also invested.