Empirik announced on September 1, 2026, that it had spun out as an independent company after raising $21 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Canapi and Alumni Ventures. The company is developing a tool that monitors changes made to systems and then infers their potential effects across the entire infrastructure, with the aim of detecting failures before they occur rather than dealing with them after services go down.
The idea for Empirik traces back to Avon Puri, who spent more than a decade managing infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as its chief information and digital transformation officer, and Sudheer Dhurjati, another technology executive at Sequoia. The two began building the product three years ago, as the practical potential of large language models for handling infrastructure tasks became clearer.
From an Internal Tool to an Independent Company
Sequoia incubated the project in 2023, then appointed Kartik Chandrayana as chief executive earlier in 2026. Chandrayana previously served as chief product officer at Quantum Metric and also held a vice president role at Salesforce focused on systems monitoring. Sequoia describes Empirik as a new type of monitoring tool focused on understanding the complex dependencies among components in large technical environments.
According to Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia Capital, Empirik acts like an independent “traffic cop” for infrastructure: it permits low-risk changes, sets boundaries for larger changes, and identifies the riskiest updates for human review. This does not mean that the tool replaces engineering teams entirely; the stated description focuses on delegating routine troubleshooting work while keeping sensitive decisions within the scope of human review.
What Changes Practically for DevOps Teams?
The idea comes at a time when software development is accelerating, increasing the number of changes that DevOps and site reliability engineering teams must track. The value Empirik presents lies not only in monitoring performance indicators after a problem occurs, but in connecting a change to its potential consequences across systems and then ranking the level of intervention required.
The company says that since launching earlier this year, it has brought on customers from startups and several Fortune 500 companies, including S&P Global and Guardant Health, as well as a large unnamed consumer packaged goods company.
Competition and Open Questions
Empirik compares its goal with what tools such as Cursor and Claude Code have offered software developers: automating certain tasks to increase the speed of work. However, this analogy describes the ambition more than it establishes an independent result; the source provides no figures on reductions in failures, response times, or customers’ operational returns.
Sequoia says Empirik currently operates in a different category from AI platforms designed for site reliability engineering, such as Sequoia-backed Resolve and Traversal, and provides a complementary layer to them. Important questions therefore remain open about the accuracy of dependency inference in highly complex environments, the limits of automated delegation, and how to measure the success of prediction before a failure occurs. What is confirmed so far is the project’s transition from an investment incubator into an independent company with substantial funding and an initial customer base—not proof of comprehensive technical superiority over the alternatives.