Sequoia-Backed Empirik Launches With $21 Million to Predict Infrastructure Outages

Empirik, an AI infrastructure startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, has launched as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding to help companies predict technology outages before they happen.

The company is focused on solving a long-standing challenge for infrastructure teams: identifying how system changes could create failures across complex technology environments. Instead of reacting after an outage, Empirik aims to detect potential problems by analysing changes and their potential impact across an organisation’s infrastructure.

The idea behind Empirik came from Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, technology leaders with backgrounds in infrastructure operations. Puri previously spent more than a decade managing infrastructure roles at companies including Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia Capital as chief digital and information officer.

The founders began exploring how large language models could help infrastructure engineers move from responding to failures toward preventing them. Their work eventually became Empirik, a platform designed to track system changes and understand potential ripple effects across large environments.

AI observability for complex infrastructure

Sequoia identified Empirik as a new type of observability platform focused on preventing and resolving incidents. The firm incubated the startup in 2023 before bringing in Kartik Chandrayana as CEO.

Chandrayana previously served as chief product officer at Quantum Metric and held an observability leadership role at Salesforce. Under his leadership, Empirik moved toward becoming an independent company focused on helping DevOps and site reliability engineering teams manage growing infrastructure complexity.

The company’s platform acts as an automated layer between infrastructure changes and production systems. Empirik said it can allow lower-risk changes, create safeguards around larger updates and identify high-risk changes that require human review.

Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said many existing observability tools struggle to understand complicated system dependencies. He described Empirik as a platform focused on continuously tracking changes across large-scale environments.

Empirik targets enterprise infrastructure teams

Since launching earlier this year, Empirik said it has attracted customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health and a major consumer packaged goods company.

The startup aims to provide infrastructure engineers with capabilities similar to how AI coding tools have changed software development workflows. Empirik believes AI can help infrastructure teams automate routine tasks and spend more time on higher-value engineering work.

The company is entering a growing market for AI-powered infrastructure management tools. Empirik positions itself as a complementary layer alongside other AI site reliability engineering platforms rather than a direct replacement for existing solutions. Sequoia, Canapi and Alumni Ventures backed the new $21 million seed funding round. Empirik said the funding will support further product development and company growth as it expands its AI-based infrastructure monitoring platform.