Empirik, an AI-powered infrastructure monitoring startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding. The round was backed by Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
The startup was founded by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, both Sequoia IT leaders, who recognized around 2023 that large language models could be used to predict system failures before they occur rather than responding to them after the fact. Empirik tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across an organization’s entire infrastructure, acting as what Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky describes as an autonomous “traffic cop” — clearing low-risk changes, applying guardrails to larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.
Earlier in 2026, Sequoia recruited Kartik Chandrayana — former chief product officer at Quantum Metric and former VP of observability at Salesforce — to serve as CEO. Puri had previously spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia in 2020 as chief digital and information officer.
Since launching earlier in 2026, Empirik has signed customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global and Guardant Health. The tool is designed to let DevOps and site reliability engineering teams offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-priority work.
Chandrayana framed the company’s ambition by drawing a parallel to developer tools: “What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering.” Balkansky characterized Empirik as a complementary layer to existing AI site reliability engineering platforms, naming Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal as examples.
The launch comes as AI tools continue to accelerate software development, placing growing pressure on infrastructure teams to keep pace with the resulting volume of system changes.
Source: TechCrunch