Sequoia's Spin-Out Empirik Raises $21M to Catch Server Outages Before They Happen
Two IT veterans who spent years firefighting tech failures at Rubrik and VMware built an AI tool that spots trouble before the system crashes. Now it's a real company with serious backing.
Key points
- Empirik raised $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi and Alumni Ventures, announced Tuesday.
- The company was incubated inside Sequoia Capital in 2023 before spinning out as an independent business in 2025.
- Customers already include S&P Global and cancer-testing firm Guardant Health.
- Former Quantum Metric CPO Kartik Chandrayana joined as CEO earlier this year.
Most tech outages follow the same painful script: something changes, something breaks, engineers scramble at 2 a.m. Empirik wants to flip that.
The startup, first reported by TechCrunch AI, grew out of a very specific frustration. Avon Puri spent more than a decade running the computers and networks that keep large companies alive, first at data-management firm Rubrik, then at cloud software company VMware. When he joined investment firm Sequoia Capital as its chief digital and information officer in 2020, the problem followed him.
What does Empirik actually do?
It watches every change made to a company's tech systems and works out what could go wrong before anything does. Think of it as a highly experienced engineer who never sleeps and reads every update ticket the moment it comes in.
Puri and Sequoia IT colleague Sudheer Dhurjati spotted that large language models, the AI technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, had become capable enough to reason about cause and effect inside complex systems. About three years ago they started building a tool to do exactly that.
Feed Empirik your infrastructure and it tracks changes across the whole environment, mapping how one tweak to one server might ripple into a failure three steps downstream. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky describes it as an autonomous traffic cop: it waves low-risk changes through, places guardrails on medium-risk ones, and flags the most dangerous updates for a human to approve.
Who is this actually for?
The tool targets DevOps and site reliability engineers, the people whose job is keeping software running around the clock. Those teams are under real pressure. AI is letting developers ship code faster than ever, which means more changes, more risk on the engineers watching the back end.
Empirik's pitch is that it handles routine scanning and troubleshooting so those engineers can focus on harder problems. CEO Chandrayana draws a direct comparison to Cursor and Claude Code, AI coding assistants that help developers write code faster. "What agentic AI," meaning AI that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, "did for software," he told TechCrunch, "Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering."
For ordinary people the upside is simpler: fewer website outages, fewer payment systems going dark, fewer hospital portals timing out at the worst moment. Our 1 September story on home computers earning money running AI jobs showed how much spare infrastructure sits outside enterprise walls. Empirik's bet is that what's inside those walls is already complex enough to need an AI watchdog full-time.
What happens next?
Empirik already has paying customers from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global and Guardant Health. The $21 million will fund growth as a fully independent business after two years inside Sequoia's walls.
Balkansky argues no direct competitor occupies the same space yet, though Empirik sits alongside, rather not against, AI site-reliability platforms like Resolve and Traversal. The cost of failure is concrete: every minute a major retailer's checkout page is down costs real money, and most companies only find out something's broken once customers start complaining. That's the gap Empirik is betting it can close.
