Prior to his 2020 role as chief digital and information officer at Sequoia Capital, Avon Puri dedicated over ten years to managing infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Around three years ago, with the emerging capabilities of large language models, Puri, collaborating with fellow Sequoia IT expert Sudheer Dhurjati, identified AI’s potential to independently address a significant hurdle for infrastructure engineers: preemptively averting technological disruptions.
These two seasoned technology professionals understood that they could develop a predictive tool to anticipate system failures, rather than merely responding to them post-occurrence. This realization spurred them to create Empirik, a platform designed to monitor system modifications and deduce their potential widespread impact throughout the infrastructure.
Sequoia saw Empirik as an innovative observability solution capable of aiding in incident prevention and resolution. Following its incubation of the startup in 2023, Sequoia brought in Kartik Chandrayana, formerly CPO at Quantum Metric and VP of observability at Salesforce, to serve as CEO earlier this year.
On Tuesday, Empirik revealed its transition into an independent entity, having secured $21 million in seed funding from investors including Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky informed TechCrunch that ‘significant resources have consistently been allocated to maintaining operational systems,’ noting that conventional observability tools often struggle with intricate system dependencies. He asserts that Empirik stands out as a pioneering tool specifically designed to monitor changes across vast environments. It functions as an automated ‘traffic controller,’ approving minor changes, implementing safeguards for more substantial ones, and highlighting critical updates for manual assessment.
Functioning as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik enables busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to delegate routine problem-solving tasks, thereby freeing them to concentrate on more strategic initiatives.
Since its launch earlier this year, Empirik has successfully acquired a diverse client base, encompassing startups and multiple Fortune 500 corporations, such as S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a prominent consumer packaged goods (CPG) firm.
Empirik aims to achieve for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code accomplished for software developers: automating specific functions to considerably accelerate their work.
Chandrayana communicated to TechCrunch that as AI hastens the speed of software development, tools empowering infrastructure engineers to manage continuous system alterations have become increasingly crucial.
He further stated, ‘Empirik seeks to replicate for infrastructure engineering what agentic AI achieved for software.’
Regarding competition, Balkansky suggests that Empirik currently occupies a unique niche, serving as a supplementary layer to existing AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-supported Traversal.