Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent more than a decade running infrastructure operations at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large-scale language models began to show their true potential, Puri, along with Sudheer Dhurjati, another Sequoia IT leader, realized that AI could help infrastructure engineers solve big challenges autonomously, preventing technology outages before they occur.
Two technology veterans realized that they could build tools that predicted system failures rather than reacting to them after the fact. This insight allowed us to build Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers potential ripple effects across the infrastructure.
Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool to help prevent and resolve incidents. Sequoia hired former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce VP of observability Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year after launching the startup in 2023.
Empirik announced Tuesday that it will be spun out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi and Alumni Ventures.
“A lot of money has always been spent to keep systems running,” Sequoia partner Bogomir Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools are unable to understand complex system dependencies. According to him, Empirik is one of the first purpose-built tools focused on tracking changes across large environments. It acts as an autonomous “traffic cop”, allowing low-risk changes, setting guardrails for larger changes, and flagging the most risky updates for human review.
By acting as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik helps busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams offload routine troubleshooting and free them to focus on higher-value priorities.
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already gained a wide range of customers from startups to several Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and major consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies.
Empirik’s goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks and make their work much faster.
As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that enable infrastructure engineers to keep up with constant system changes are more important than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.
“What Agent AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.
In terms of competition, Balkansky argues that Empirik is currently in a category of its own, serving as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and Traversal powered by Sequoia.
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