{"id":879320,"date":"2026-09-04T05:20:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T05:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/879320\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T05:20:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T05:20:19","slug":"sequoia-incubated-empirik-launches-with-21m-to-predict-outages-before-they-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/879320\/","title":{"rendered":"Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, <a href=\"https:\/\/sequoiacap.com\/people\/avon-puri\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Avon Puri<\/a> spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began showing their true potential, Puri, alongside another Sequoia IT leader, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/dhurjati\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Sudheer Dhurjati<\/a>, recognized that AI could help autonomously solve a major challenge for infrastructure engineers \u2014 preventing tech outages before they occur.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The two tech veterans realized that instead of reacting to system failures after the fact, they could build a tool to predict them. This insight led them to build <a href=\"https:\/\/empirik.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Empirik<\/a>, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool that helps prevent and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/kartikc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Kartik Chandrayana<\/a> as CEO earlier this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThere has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,\u201d Sequoia partner <a href=\"https:\/\/sequoiacap.com\/people\/bogomil-balkansky\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Bogomil Balkansky<\/a> told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments. It acts as an autonomous \u201ctraffic cop\u201d \u2014 permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including Guardant Health and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Empirik\u2019s goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work significantly faster.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As for competition, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a category of its own for now, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.<\/p>\n<p>When you purchase through links in our articles, <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/techcrunch-affiliate-monetization-standards\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":879321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[64,63,99,198,93217,448589],"class_list":["post-879320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-sequoia-capital","tag-sres"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/879321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}