Earlier than becoming a member of Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and knowledge officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade operating infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years in the past, as giant language fashions started exhibiting their true potential, Puri, alongside one other Sequoia IT chief, Sudheer Dhurjati, acknowledged that AI may assist autonomously remedy a serious problem for infrastructure engineers — stopping tech outages earlier than they happen.
The 2 tech veterans realized that as an alternative of reacting to system failures after the very fact, they may construct a instrument to foretell them. This perception led them to construct Empirik, a product that tracks system modifications and infers their potential ripple results throughout your complete infrastructure.
Sequoia acknowledged that Empirik might be a brand new kind of observability instrument that helps stop and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this yr.
Empirik introduced Tuesday that it’s spinning out as an unbiased firm after elevating $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
“There has all the time been some huge cash spent in holding programs up and operating,” Sequoia companion Bogomil Balkansky informed TechCrunch, including that the majority present observability instruments fail to know advanced system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is among the first devoted instruments centered on monitoring modifications throughout huge environments. It acts as an autonomous “site visitors cop” — allowing low-risk modifications, setting guardrails on bigger ones, and flagging essentially the most harmful updates for human overview.
By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik permits busy DevOps and web site reliability engineering groups to dump routine troubleshooting and deal with higher-value priorities.
Since launching earlier this yr, Empirik has already introduced on clients starting from startups to a number of Fortune 500 gamers, together with S&P International, Guardant Well being, and a serious shopper packaged items (CPG) firm.
Empirik’s objective is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software program builders: automate sure duties to allow them to work considerably quicker.
As AI accelerates the tempo of software program improvement, instruments that assist infrastructure engineers sustain with fixed system modifications are extra important than ever, Chandrayana informed TechCrunch.
“What agentic AI did for software program, Empirik desires to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.
As for competitors, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a class of its personal for now, appearing as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.
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