Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to foretell outages earlier than they occur

Earlier than becoming a member of Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and knowledge officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade working infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years in the past, as giant language fashions started exhibiting their true potential, Puri, alongside one other Sequoia IT chief, Sudheer Dhurjati, acknowledged that AI might assist autonomously remedy a significant problem for infrastructure engineers — stopping tech outages earlier than they happen.

The 2 tech veterans realized that as an alternative of reacting to system failures after the actual fact, they may construct a instrument to foretell them. This perception led them to construct Empirik, a product that tracks system adjustments and infers their potential ripple results throughout all the infrastructure.

Sequoia acknowledged that Empirik may very well be a brand new kind of observability instrument that helps stop and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this 12 months.

Empirik introduced Tuesday that it’s spinning out as an impartial firm after elevating $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“There has at all times been some huge cash spent in protecting techniques up and working,” Sequoia associate Bogomil Balkansky informed TechCrunch, including that the majority present observability instruments fail to grasp complicated system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is without doubt one of the first devoted instruments targeted on monitoring adjustments throughout huge environments. It acts as an autonomous “visitors cop” — allowing low-risk adjustments, setting guardrails on bigger ones, and flagging essentially the most harmful updates for human evaluation.

By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik permits busy DevOps and web site reliability engineering groups to dump routine troubleshooting and give attention to higher-value priorities.

Since launching earlier this 12 months, Empirik has already introduced on prospects starting from startups to a number of Fortune 500 gamers, together with S&P International, Guardant Well being, and a significant shopper packaged items (CPG) firm.

Empirik’s objective is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software program builders: automate sure duties to allow them to work considerably sooner.

As AI accelerates the tempo of software program growth, instruments that assist infrastructure engineers sustain with fixed system adjustments are extra very important than ever, Chandrayana informed TechCrunch.

“What agentic AI did for software program, Empirik desires to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.

As for competitors, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a class of its personal for now, appearing as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.