Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital in 2023, announced it has raised $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures and is spinning out as an independent company. The announcement was made on Tuesday.
Founders and leadership
The company was founded by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, both of whom served as IT leaders at Sequoia; Avon Puri joined Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer and previously spent more than a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. As large language models began demonstrating broader potential three years ago, Puri and Dhurjati saw an opportunity to use AI to predict and prevent infrastructure outages rather than simply react to them.
Sequoia incubated the effort in 2023 and earlier this year recruited Kartik Chandrayana to serve as CEO. Chandrayana previously held product leadership roles at Quantum Metric and led observability at Salesforce.
What Empirik does
Empirik builds a system that tracks changes across infrastructure and infers their likely ripple effects across the entire environment. Rather than functioning solely as an alerting tool, Empirik is intended to act autonomously in several ways: permitting low‑risk changes, imposing guardrails on larger changes, and flagging high‑risk updates for human review. Bogomil Balkansky, a Sequoia partner, says most existing observability tools do not fully understand complex system dependencies, and positions Empirik as one of the first tools focused specifically on change tracking at massive scale.
The company presents the product as an autonomous infrastructure engineer that lets busy DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams offload routine troubleshooting and concentrate on higher‑value work.
Customers and competition
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers that range from startups to several Fortune 500 companies. Named customers include S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a large consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.
Balkansky says Empirik currently sits in a category of its own and is intended to be a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia‑backed Traversal.
Why this matters
As AI accelerates software development, infrastructure changes are occurring more frequently and can introduce new failure modes. Empirik’s goal is to bring to infrastructure engineering the same kind of automation gains that tools like Cursor and Claude Code provided for software developers, enabling teams to move faster while reducing outage risk, according to Kartik Chandrayana.
The new seed financing will be used to advance Empirik’s autonomous observability capabilities and expand its customer base while integrating into the broader AI SRE ecosystem.
Summary
Empirik, incubated by Sequoia, raised $21 million in seed funding and is launching as an independent company. The startup uses AI to model the effects of infrastructure changes, aiming to prevent outages and automate routine SRE tasks under the leadership of CEO Kartik Chandrayana.
