Sequoia-Backed Empirik Raises $21M to Forecast Outages Ahead of Time

Prior to his role as chief digital and information officer at Sequoia Capital starting in 2020, Avon Puri spent over ten years overseeing infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Recognizing the burgeoning potential of large language models three years ago, Puri, along with fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati, identified that AI could autonomously address a significant challenge for infrastructure engineers — averting tech outages before they manifest.

The duo understood that rather than merely reacting to system breakdowns, they could develop a predictive tool. This realization led to the creation of Empirik, a solution that monitors system changes and deduces their likely consequences throughout the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia acknowledged that Empirik had the potential to be a groundbreaking observability tool, aiming to preempt and resolve incidents. After nurturing the startup in 2023, Sequoia appointed ex-Quantum Metric CPO and former Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as the CEO earlier this year.

On Tuesday, Empirik revealed its separation into an independent entity, having secured $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“Much investment has always gone into maintaining system reliability,” remarked Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky to TechCrunch, noting that many current observability tools struggle to comprehend intricate system interdependencies. He asserts that Empirik stands out as one of the first dedicated solutions aimed at monitoring changes across expansive environments. It functions as an autonomous “traffic cop” — allowing low-risk modifications, establishing boundaries on larger changes, and highlighting the most critical updates for human oversight.

By acting as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik enables overloaded DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to delegate routine troubleshooting tasks and concentrate on more significant priorities.

Since its launch earlier this year, Empirik has welcomed a diverse clientele, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) organization.

Empirik aims to transform the work of infrastructure engineers in the same way that Cursor and Claude Code revolutionized the tasks of software developers: by automating specific duties to enhance efficiency.

With the acceleration of software development driven by AI, tools that assist infrastructure engineers in managing constant system changes have never been more crucial, according to Chandrayana’s comments to TechCrunch.

“What agentic AI achieved for software, Empirik aspires to do for infrastructure engineering,” he stated.

Regarding competition, Balkansky contends that Empirik currently occupies a unique niche, serving as a supplementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.