Empirik, a new startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, has launched with $21 million in seed funding to develop AI-powered tools that predict IT infrastructure outages before they occur. The company was founded by industry veterans Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, who previously led infrastructure teams at Rubrik and VMware. They envisioned using AI to autonomously identify potential system failures by monitoring changes across complex IT environments, enabling proactive outage prevention rather than reactive fixes.

Sequoia first incubated Empirik in 2023, recognizing its potential to transform observability in infrastructure management. The startup recently appointed Kartik Chandrayana, a former Quantum Metric chief product officer and Salesforce observability VP, as CEO. Empirik operates as an autonomous system that tracks system modifications, assesses risk levels, and flags critical updates for human intervention. This "traffic cop" approach helps DevOps and site reliability engineers reduce routine troubleshooting and focus on strategic priorities.

Since its debut earlier this year, Empirik has secured clients that range from agile startups to several Fortune 500 corporations, including S&P Global and Guardant Health. The company aims to bring to infrastructure engineering the type of automation that early AI code tools like Cursor and Claude Code introduced for software development. As AI accelerates software deployment cycles, tools like Empirik are becoming essential to managing the increasingly dynamic and complex IT landscapes.

Empirik positions itself uniquely in the market by complementing existing AI-enabled SRE platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky highlights Empirik’s focus on understanding system dependencies and preventing outages as a crucial innovation. With this $21 million backing, Empirik intends to lead a new wave of observability tools designed to keep IT systems more reliable and efficient in an AI-driven era.