Empirik, an AI-powered infrastructure observability startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $21 million in seed funding to tackle a problem that costs enterprises billions annually: unplanned IT outages. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Canapi and Alumni Ventures.
The company’s founding team brings deep infrastructure experience. Avon Puri, who spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, co-founded Empirik alongside Sudheer Dhurjati, another Sequoia IT leader. Three years ago, as large language models matured, the duo recognized an opportunity to apply AI to a persistent operational challenge: moving beyond reactive incident response to proactive prevention.
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From internal tool to standalone company
Empirik began as an internal project at Sequoia, incubated within the firm’s IT organization. The platform tracks changes across massive IT environments—such as code deployments, configuration updates, and infrastructure modifications—and infers their potential downstream effects. It functions as an autonomous “traffic cop,” automatically approving low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch that existing observability tools often fail to understand complex system dependencies. “There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” he said, noting that Empirik is one of the first dedicated tools focused on change tracking at scale.
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To lead the newly independent company, Sequoia recruited Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year. Chandrayana previously served as chief product officer at Quantum Metric and vice president of observability at Salesforce. His background aligns with Empirik’s ambition to become a standard layer in enterprise infrastructure management.
Why this matters for DevOps and SRE teams
The timing is strategic. As AI accelerates software development, the pace of system changes is increasing, making manual oversight unsustainable. Empirik’s goal, as Chandrayana put it, is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate routine tasks so teams can focus on higher-value priorities.
“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” Chandrayana told TechCrunch.
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already attracted a mix of startups and Fortune 500 clients, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company. The diversity of customers suggests the platform addresses a universal pain point across industries that rely on complex, interdependent IT systems.
Competitive field and outlook
Empirik enters a crowded but evolving observability market. Established players like Datadog and New Relic offer monitoring and alerting, while newer AI-driven platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal focus on AI site reliability engineering (SRE). Balkansky claims Empirik occupies a distinct niche—change intelligence—and acts as a complementary layer to these tools rather than a direct competitor.
“We’re not trying to replace the monitoring stack,” Balkansky said. “We’re adding a layer that understands the blast radius of every change.”
The company’s seed round, while modest compared to some AI infrastructure startups, reflects a deliberate focus on product-market fit. Empirik’s success will depend on its ability to prove that AI can meaningfully reduce outage frequency and severity—a metric that resonates directly with enterprise bottom lines.
For infrastructure teams, the emergence of tools like Empirik signals a shift from reactive firefighting to predictive management. As AI continues to permeate every layer of the software stack, the ability to anticipate failures before they occur could become a competitive differentiator for enterprises working through increasingly complex digital environments.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The technology startup market is volatile and uncertain; readers should conduct their own research before making any investment decisions.
