Empirik has spun out as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding to develop an AI system that helps infrastructure teams predict how software and configuration changes could affect their environments before problems occur. The funding came from Sequoia Capital, S32, Canapi Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
The company was incubated inside Sequoia in 2023 by Avon Puri, Sequoia’s chief digital and information officer, and Sudheer Dhurjati, another IT leader at the firm. Empirik announced its launch and funding on September 1.
Tracking Changes Before They Cause Problems
Empirik tracks infrastructure changes and maps their potential effects across connected systems. The software is designed to identify the likely blast radius of a proposed change, detect configuration drift, and flag higher-risk updates for human review.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky described the system as an autonomous “traffic cop” that can allow lower-risk changes, apply guardrails to larger ones, and escalate potentially dangerous updates. The aim is to shift some infrastructure work from reacting to outages toward evaluating changes before they are deployed.
Puri previously spent more than a decade working on infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. He and Dhurjati began developing Empirik after concluding that large language models could help infrastructure engineers reason across complex dependencies that are difficult to track manually.
Earlier this year, Sequoia recruited Kartik Chandrayana as Empirik’s CEO. Chandrayana previously served as chief product officer at Quantum Metric and as vice president of product for observability and big data at Salesforce.
Empirik Targets DevOps and SRE Workloads
Empirik is intended to reduce routine troubleshooting work for DevOps and site reliability engineering teams. Chandrayana said the company wants to apply automation to infrastructure engineering in a similar way that tools such as Cursor and Claude Code have automated parts of software development.
The company says its system can understand the intent behind a change, map that change against live infrastructure, identify affected services and owners, and provide supporting evidence before the update is made.
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers ranging from startups to large enterprises. The company has named S&P Global and Guardant Health among its customers, along with a major consumer packaged goods company.
Chandrayana said faster software development driven by AI is increasing the volume of infrastructure changes that engineering teams must manage. Empirik is designed to act as an additional operational layer that evaluates those changes as they occur.
The company competes indirectly with AI-focused site reliability engineering platforms such as Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. Balkansky said Empirik is intended to complement those products by focusing specifically on infrastructure changes and their dependencies.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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