Empirik raises $21M for AI outage prevention
Sequoia-incubated startup Empirik has launched with $21 million in seed funding. Its AI tool aims to prevent infrastructure outages by tracking system changes and dependencies, automating tasks for DevOps teams.
Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, announced its launch on Tuesday. It raised $21 million in seed funding. The company's AI product is designed to prevent technology outages. It does this by analyzing system changes.
Founded by former Sequoia IT leaders Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, the company emerged from a three-year internal project. The founders saw potential in large language models to solve infrastructure challenges autonomously. Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.
Funding and Development
The $21 million seed round was led by Sequoia Capital. Canapi and Alumni Ventures also participated. Sequoia first incubated the startup in 2023 before this independent spin-out. According to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky, significant resources are traditionally spent on maintaining system uptime. He noted most existing tools fail to grasp complex dependencies.
"There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running," Balkansky told TechCrunch. He claims Empirik is among the first tools dedicated to tracking changes across massive environments.
How the AI Model Operates
The tool acts as an autonomous infrastructure engineer. It monitors system modifications and infers their potential ripple effects across an entire infrastructure stack. Empirik functions like a "traffic cop," according to Balkansky. It permits low-risk changes automatically. It sets guardrails for larger ones. It flags the most dangerous updates for human review.
This approach allows DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to offload routine troubleshooting. They can then focus on higher-value priorities. The company's goal is to automate certain infrastructure tasks. This enables engineers to work faster.
Market Position and Early Adoption
CEO Kartik Chandrayana positioned the tool as a response to accelerating software development. "As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever," he said. He added that Empirik aims to do for infrastructure engineering what agentic AI did for software development.
Balkansky claims Empirik currently occupies its own category. He described it as a complementary layer to existing AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. Since its soft launch earlier this year, Empirik has onboarded customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 companies.
Reported early clients include S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company. The startup's launch reflects a funding trend towards AI models that apply reasoning to complex, operational systems.
