Empirik, a Sequoia-incubated startup, just launched with $21 million in seed funding to solve one of infrastructure engineering's biggest headaches: preventing system outages before they occur. The tool uses artificial intelligence to track changes across complex systems and predict their ripple effects, acting as an autonomous traffic cop that either permits low-risk updates, sets guardrails on larger ones, or flags dangerous changes for human review.

How Did Sequoia Spot This Opportunity?

The story behind Empirik reveals how venture capital firms are increasingly building startups from within. Avon Puri, who joined Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began demonstrating their potential, Puri and fellow Sequoia IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati recognized that AI could solve a critical challenge for infrastructure engineers: preventing tech outages rather than reacting to them after they happen.

Instead of waiting for systems to fail, the two realized they could build a tool to predict failures. This insight led to Empirik's core product, which tracks system changes and infers their potential consequences across entire infrastructure environments. Sequoia incubated the startup in 2023, and earlier this year, the firm recruited Kartik Chandrayana, a former Chief Product Officer at Quantum Metric and observability vice president at Salesforce, as CEO.

What Makes Empirik Different from Existing Tools?

The infrastructure observability market already has established players, but Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky argues that Empirik occupies a unique category. Most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies, he explained. Empirik, by contrast, is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments and understanding how those changes cascade through interconnected systems.

"There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running," said Bogomil Balkansky, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies.

Bogomil Balkansky, Partner at Sequoia Capital

The tool functions as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, allowing DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities. By automating certain infrastructure tasks, Empirik aims to do for infrastructure engineers what coding assistants like Cursor and Claude Code have done for software developers: accelerate their work significantly.

How Does Empirik Work in Practice?

Empirik's approach involves three tiers of automation. For low-risk changes, the system permits them automatically. For medium-risk updates, it establishes guardrails to constrain potential damage. For the most dangerous changes, it flags them for human review and decision-making. This graduated approach balances automation with human oversight, ensuring that critical infrastructure decisions remain under human control while routine operations accelerate.

The startup has already attracted significant customer interest since launching earlier this year. Its customer roster ranges from early-stage startups to several Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company.

Steps to Understand Empirik's Role in Modern Infrastructure

• Autonomous Change Management: Empirik automatically permits low-risk infrastructure changes, eliminating manual approval delays and allowing teams to deploy updates faster without sacrificing safety.
• Ripple Effect Prediction: The tool tracks how changes in one part of a system cascade through interconnected infrastructure, identifying potential failures before they occur in production environments.
• Human-in-the-Loop Flagging: For high-risk changes, Empirik flags updates for human review rather than blocking them entirely, preserving human judgment on critical decisions while automating routine approvals.

CEO Kartik Chandrayana emphasized the timing of Empirik's launch. As agentic AI accelerates the pace of software development, infrastructure teams face mounting pressure to keep systems stable amid constant change. "What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering," he noted.

Kartik Chandrayana

"What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering," said Kartik Chandrayana.

Kartik Chandrayana, CEO at Empirik

The $21 million seed round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Canapi and Alumni Ventures. Sequoia partner Balkansky claims Empirik operates in a category of its own for now, functioning as a complementary layer to existing AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal, rather than directly competing with them.

Empirik's launch reflects a broader trend in venture capital: recognizing that as AI accelerates software development cycles, the infrastructure layer becomes a critical bottleneck. By automating infrastructure engineering tasks, Empirik addresses a pain point that will only grow more acute as development teams ship code faster than ever before.