Empirik, incubated by Sequoia Capital, announced that it had become an independent company as an infrastructure technology aiming to predict system failures before they occur, and had raised $21 million in seed funding. Sequoia, Canapi and Alumni Ventures participated in the funding round.
Empirik’s origins date back to 2023, when Sequoia’s chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri, and another technology executive at the company, Sudheer Dhurjati, realized that artificial intelligence could identify infrastructure problems in advance. The product monitors changes in systems and infers their potential impact across the entire infrastructure.
The company is led by CEO Kartik Chandrayana, a former Quantum Metric product executive and Salesforce vice president of observability who was appointed to the role earlier this year. Empirik operates like an autonomous “traffic cop” that allows low-risk changes, sets boundaries for major changes and sends the most dangerous updates for human review. In doing so, it aims to reduce the routine troubleshooting work of DevOps and site reliability engineering teams.
Since its launch earlier this year, Empirik has won customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 companies, including Guardant Health and a major consumer products company. The company aims to provide infrastructure engineers with the automation that Cursor and Claude Code offer software developers. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said that existing observability tools have struggled to understand complex system dependencies. Balkansky argued that Empirik currently occupies a separate category that complements AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.
Why it matters
Empirik’s positioning as an independent company points to a shift in infrastructure management from tools that merely make problems visible toward systems that assess the potential consequences of changes and determine the appropriate level of intervention. This approach aims to reduce the routine troubleshooting burden, particularly for DevOps and site reliability engineering teams, while focusing human review on higher-risk updates. Its customer base, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, indicates that the product is being applied to infrastructure needs at different scales. However, defining Empirik as a separate category that complements existing AI-powered SRE platforms leaves open the question of how companies will integrate such tools into their existing observability and operations processes.