Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, announced its spin-out as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.

The company emerged from an insight by two Sequoia IT leaders—Avon Puri (former Rubrik and VMware infrastructure executive, later Sequoia’s CDIO) and Sudheer Dhurjati—who saw that large language models could predict infrastructure outages before they happen.

Instead of reacting to failures, Empirik tracks system changes and infers their ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies, and 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 dangerous updates for human review.

This allows DevOps and SRE teams to offload routine troubleshooting. Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.

Since launching, Empirik has customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major CPG firm.

Chandrayana said the goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for developers: automate tasks so they can work faster.

Balkansky claims Empirik is in a category of its own, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal.

The article is a straightforward funding and product announcement, not a deep technical paper.