Sequoia-incubated Empirik spins out with $21M to predict outages before they hit
What's the deal? EmpirikDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an AI observability startup incubated by Sequoia CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, announced Tuesday it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding. Sequoia, Canapi VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Alumni Ventures backed the round.
Why now? Three years ago, as large language models showed their potential, Sequoia's chief digital and information officer Avon Puri and IT leader Sudheer Dhurjati saw that AI could help engineers prevent tech outages before they happen. Sequoia incubated the startup in 2023, then recruited former Quantum Metric chief product officer Kartik Chandrayana as chief executive officer earlier this year.
What's the endgame? Empirik tracks system changes and infers their ripple effects across an entire infrastructure. It acts as an autonomous "traffic cop" — permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging dangerous updates for human review.
By the numbers: The seed round lands in the 99th percentile by size among all seed deals in the country, out of a sample of 5,620. That scale reflects both Sequoia's backing and the ambition behind the launch.
What's the product? Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has signed customers from startups to Fortune 500 players, including SP GlobalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Guardant Health, and a major consumer packaged goods company. The tool lets busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams offload routine troubleshooting to focus on higher-value work.
What could go wrong? Most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies, Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said. Getting an autonomous agent to correctly judge which infrastructure changes are safe is the core technical bet.
The signal: Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineers what CursorDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Claude CodeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → did for software developers. "What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering," Chandrayana said. As AI speeds up software development, tools that help engineers keep pace with constant system changes look increasingly vital.
Read more: TechCrunch
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