Sequoia-backed Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages
Empirik spins out as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia to predict IT infrastructure outages using AI.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Empirik raised $21 million in seed funding led by Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures
- The AI tool acts as a traffic cop to track system changes and forecast tech outages
- Founded by former Sequoia IT leaders Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati
- Early customers include S&P Global, Guardant Health, and major CPG enterprises
The IT infrastructure landscape is shifting as Sequoia-incubated startup Empirik officially spins out as an independent company. The firm launched with $21 million in seed funding backed by prominent investors including Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
The venture originated three years ago when Avon Puri, chief digital and information officer at Sequoia who previously ran infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware, teamed up with fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati. Recognizing the potential of large language models, the duo aimed to tackle a major pain point for infrastructure engineers: preventing technology outages before they happen rather than reacting to failures after the fact.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Empirik functions as an autonomous traffic cop for enterprise systems. It tracks system modifications and infers potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure, granting low-risk updates, setting guardrails for larger changes, and flagging high-risk updates for human review.
"What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering"
According to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky, traditional observability tools often struggle with complex system dependencies despite heavy enterprise spending on system uptime. Empirik stands out as one of the pioneer tools dedicated to tracking changes across massive environments.
Securing a $21 million seed round highlights the growing demand for autonomous engineering layers that alleviate repetitive troubleshooting tasks for overwhelmed DevOps teams navigating high-velocity software delivery.
Since its initial rollout earlier this year, Empirik has secured enterprise clients ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 corporations such as S&P Global and Guardant Health. Former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana serves as the company's CEO.
Source: TechCrunch
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