Sequoia-backed Empirik Raises $21M to Predict Infrastructure Outages

Sequoia Capital-incubated startup Empirik has officially spun out as an independent company following a twenty-one million dollar seed funding round led by Sequoia, with participation from Canapi and Alumni Ventures. Founded by Avon Puri, former chief digital and information officer at Sequoia and infrastructure veteran from Rubrik and VMware, alongside Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati, Empirik is building an artificial intelligence platform designed to predict and prevent infrastructure outages before they disrupt operations. The company appointed Kartik Chandrayana, former chief product officer at Quantum Metric and ex-vice president of observability at Salesforce, as chief executive earlier this year to drive commercial scaling. Empirik operates as an autonomous observability solution that continuously monitors system changes and maps their potential ripple effects across complex technical environments. Unlike traditional monitoring tools that primarily react to failures, the platform proactively assesses infrastructure modifications to identify high-risk updates, automatically approve low-impact changes, and flag critical alterations for human review. This architecture effectively positions the software as an automated infrastructure engineer, allowing DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to eliminate routine troubleshooting and dedicate resources to strategic initiatives. The development of Empirik stems from Puri and Dhurjati observation that large language models and agentic AI could be applied to infrastructure stability. Recognizing that legacy observability platforms struggle with intricate system dependencies, Sequoia began incubating the concept in twenty twenty-three before formalizing the startup. Early commercial traction has been strong, with the platform already deployed across a mix of venture-backed startups and Fortune five hundred enterprises, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a prominent consumer packaged goods firm. Industry executives frame Empirik as a necessary evolution in site reliability engineering. As artificial intelligence accelerates code deployment and infrastructure complexity, manual oversight becomes a bottleneck. Chandrayana has stated the company aims to replicate the developer productivity gains delivered by AI coding assistants like Cursor and Claude Code, but applied to backend infrastructure operations. Sequoia partners view the platform as occupying a distinct market category, functioning as a complementary layer alongside existing AI-driven SRE solutions rather than a direct competitor. By bridging the gap between rapid software delivery and system stability, Empirik positions itself as a critical utility for organizations navigating modern cloud architectures.