Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen

Before joining Sequoia Capital successful 2020 arsenic main integer and accusation officer, Avon Puri spent implicit a decennary moving infrastructure astatine Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, arsenic ample connection models began showing their existent potential, Puri, alongside different Sequoia IT leader, Sudheer Dhurjati, recognized that AI could assistance autonomously lick a large situation for infrastructure engineers—preventing tech outages earlier they occur.

The 2 tech veterans realized that alternatively of reacting to strategy failures aft the fact, they could physique a instrumentality to foretell them. This penetration led them to physique Empirik, a merchandise that tracks strategy changes and infers their imaginable ripple effects crossed the full infrastructure.

Sequoia recognized that Empirik could beryllium a caller benignant of observability instrumentality that helps forestall and resoluteness incidents. After incubating the startup successful 2023, Sequoia recruited erstwhile Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana arsenic CEO earlier this year.

Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning retired arsenic an autarkic institution aft raising $21 cardinal successful effect backing from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

“There has ever been a batch of wealth spent successful keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia spouse Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that astir existing observability tools neglect to recognize analyzable strategy dependencies. Empirik, helium claims, is 1 of the archetypal dedicated tools focused connected tracking changes crossed monolithic environments. It acts arsenic an autonomous “traffic cop”—permitting low-risk changes, mounting guardrails connected larger ones, and flagging the astir unsafe updates for quality review.

By serving arsenic an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows engaged DevOps and tract reliability engineering teams to offload regular troubleshooting and absorption connected higher-value priorities.

Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought connected customers ranging from startups to respective Fortune 500 players, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a large user packaged goods (CPG) company.

Empirik’s extremity is to bash for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for bundle developers: automate definite tasks truthful they tin enactment importantly faster.

As AI accelerates the gait of bundle development, tools that assistance infrastructure engineers support up with changeless strategy changes are much captious than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.

“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to bash for infrastructure engineering,” helium added.

As for competition, Balkansky claims Empirik is successful a class of its ain for now, acting arsenic a complementary furniture to AI SRE platforms similar Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.