Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020.
Three years ago, Puri and Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati realised that artificial intelligence could stop technology failures before they happened. Instead of reacting to system breakdowns, they built Empirik to track changes and guess their ripple effects across an entire infrastructure.
Sequoia saw this as a new kind of observability tool. After incubating the startup in 2023, the firm hired Kartik Chandrayana, a former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP, as CEO earlier this year.
Empirik announced on Tuesday that it is becoming an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch that much money goes into keeping systems running, yet most observability tools fail to understand complex dependencies. Empirik is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments. It acts as an autonomous traffic cop, permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.
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.
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company.
Empirik aims to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work faster.
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.
“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added.
Regarding 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.
What it means
DevOps teams will spend less time putting out fires and more time on strategic work. The tool handles the risk assessment of changes automatically, letting humans intervene only when the potential danger is high.
