Empirik, an AI-driven infrastructure startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, has launched as an independent company after raising EUR 18 million in seed funding. The financing was led by Sequoia, with participation from Canapi and Alumni Ventures. The company’s central promise is to help engineering teams predict and prevent system failures before they happen, rather than scrambling to fix them after the fact.
The idea traces back to Avon Puri, who joined Sequoia in 2020 as chief digital and information officer after more than a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. About three years ago, as large language models began demonstrating their capabilities, Puri and fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati concluded that AI could autonomously tackle one of the toughest problems facing infrastructure engineers: stopping outages before they occur.
Instead of reacting to failures, the pair set out to anticipate them. That vision became Empirik, a product that tracks changes across systems and infers how those changes might ripple through an organization’s entire infrastructure.
An Autonomous “Traffic Cop” for Infrastructure
Sequoia viewed Empirik as a new class of observability tool built to prevent and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, the firm brought in Kartik Chandrayana, former chief product officer at Quantum Metric and a Salesforce observability vice president, as CEO earlier this year.
According to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky, most existing observability tools struggle to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he said, is among the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across large-scale environments. The platform functions as an autonomous “traffic cop,” approving low-risk changes, applying guardrails to larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.
By operating as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik lets DevOps and site reliability engineering teams hand off routine troubleshooting and concentrate on higher-value work.
Early Customers Include Fortune 500 Names
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers ranging from startups to major enterprises, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a large consumer packaged goods company. The company aims to do for infrastructure engineers what tools like Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate specific tasks so teams can move significantly faster.
As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are increasingly essential, Chandrayana said. “What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he noted.
On competition, Balkansky said Empirik currently occupies a category of its own, serving as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. Empirik announced its spinout and funding on Tuesday.
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