The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2023–2026
Empirik spins out of Sequoia with $21M to predict outages before they happen
Sequoia incubated Empirik from 2023; it spun out on Sept 1, 2026 with a $21M seed to predict infrastructure outages by modeling change ripple effects.
Empirik
What the business is
Empirik sells an AI platform that tracks changes across an enterprise's IT infrastructure and predicts which ones will trigger outages, acting as an autonomous 'traffic cop' for deployments.
Starting capital：$21M seed (2026), incubated inside Sequoia since 2023
How it started
Avon Puri, who ran infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before becoming Sequoia's chief digital and information officer in 2020, and fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati saw large language models mature around 2023 and began building a tool to prevent failures rather than react to them. Sequoia incubated the startup internally, and later recruited Kartik Chandrayana, ex-CPO of Quantum Metric and ex-observability VP at Salesforce, as CEO.
What happened
Empirik launched its product earlier this year and brought on customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company. On September 1, 2026 it announced its spin-out as an independent company with a $21 million seed round from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
How it ended up
Just launched as an independent company; the bet is still early. Sequoia claims Empirik is in a category of its own for now, positioning it as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.
Background
Empirik is an infrastructure-AI startup betting that outages can be predicted instead of reacted to. Its platform tracks every change across an enterprise's IT systems and infers the ripple effects through complex dependencies, acting as an autonomous 'traffic cop' — permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review.
The idea grew inside Sequoia Capital: Avon Puri, who ran infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before becoming Sequoia's chief digital and information officer in 2020, and fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati began building around 2023 as large language models matured. Sequoia incubated the startup, then recruited Kartik Chandrayana, ex-CPO of Quantum Metric and ex-observability VP at Salesforce, as CEO earlier this year.
On September 1, 2026, Empirik announced it was spinning out as an independent company with a $21 million seed round from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. Since launching its product earlier this year it has brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky says most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies, and claims Empirik is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments — aiming to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers.
What has to be true
- Most observability tools react after a service degrades; the expensive, painful part is the hours of triage that follow.
- Modern systems have deep dependencies, so a single change can ripple unpredictably — complexity that AI can model continuously in a way static dashboards cannot.
- As AI accelerates software delivery, infrastructure teams face constant change and have no tool that offloads the review-and-risk decision itself.
- Incubating inside Sequoia let the team build and test with real IT operations before raising external capital, then hire an experienced CEO.
What can be applied
A new AI capability is best sold as a new job to be done: Empirik didn't build a faster monitor, it automated the change-review decision itself and made prediction the product.
Aftermath
As of September 2026, Empirik is live with enterprise customers including S&P Global and Guardant Health, and has just spun out with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The company plans to develop the platform and expand its team, positioning itself as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms rather than replacing observability suites outright. Its category-of-one claim is untested against an increasingly crowded market.
Sources
- Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen
- Empirik Raises $21 Million to Predict Digital System Failures Before Services Break Down
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe what you are building, and see who is betting on the same thing.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card