Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen
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Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, launched as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The company was co-founded by Avon Puri, Sequoia's former chief digital and information officer, and Sudheer Dhurjati, another Sequoia IT leader, who recognized that large language models could help predict infrastructure outages before they occur. Empirik's product tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across an organization's infrastructure, acting as an autonomous "traffic cop" to allow low-risk changes and flag dangerous ones for human review. Kartik Chandrayana, former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP, serves as CEO. The company has already onboarded customers including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company. Its goal is to automate routine troubleshooting for DevOps and site reliability engineering teams, similar to how AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code accelerate software developers. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said Empirik occupies its own category for now, complementing AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Traversal.
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