Empirik raises $21M to predict infrastructure outages with AI
Original: Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen
Why This Matters
AI-driven outage prevention addresses a growing need as accelerating software development strains infrastructure teams.
Sequoia-incubated startup Empirik launched Tuesday as an independent company after raising $21M in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The AI tool tracks system changes and predicts their ripple effects to prevent tech outages before they occur.
Empirik was founded by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, both IT leaders at Sequoia Capital, who identified AI's potential to autonomously prevent infrastructure failures. Sequoia began incubating the startup in 2023, then recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier in 2026. The platform functions as an autonomous 'traffic cop,' permitting low-risk infrastructure changes, applying guardrails to larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky noted that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies, positioning Empirik as one of the first dedicated change-tracking tools for large environments. Since its earlier 2026 launch, the company has signed customers including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and an undisclosed major CPG company. Chandrayana described Empirik's ambition as doing for infrastructure engineering what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers — automating routine tasks to accelerate workflows. Balkansky characterized Empirik as complementary to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal rather than a direct competitor.