Empirik, an AI-powered infrastructure tool incubated within Sequoia Capital, has spun out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The startup was founded by Sequoia’s Avon Puri, chief digital and information officer, and IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati, who recognized an opportunity to use AI to predict system outages before they occur rather than respond after the fact.
Empirik tracks system changes across large infrastructure environments and infers their potential ripple effects, functioning as an autonomous decision layer that approves low-risk changes, applies guardrails to larger ones, and escalates the riskiest updates for human review. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said most existing observability tools struggle to understand complex system dependencies, positioning Empirik as one of the first products built specifically to track change-related risk at scale.
Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year. Chandrayana said Empirik aims to do for infrastructure engineers what AI coding tools have done for software developers, helping teams offload routine troubleshooting and move faster as the pace of system change accelerates.
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including Guardant Health. Balkansky described the company as occupying a distinct category, complementary to AI site reliability platforms like Resolve and Traversal.
