Sequoia Capital-backed infrastructure company AI Empirik announced the completion of a $21 million seed round of financing and is now operating as an independent company. The company specializes in identifying risks before system failures occur, helping enterprise operations teams to proactively handle system changes that could cause disruptions.
From Sequoia projects to independence
Empirik was initiated by Avon Puri, who once served as the Chief Digital and Information Officer at Sequoia, and another person in charge, Sudheer Dhurjati. The two believe that with the improvement of large language model capabilities, AI can now be used to address a type of old problem in infrastructure operations: not to troubleshoot after a failure occurs, but to make predictions before a failure happens.
Sequoia began incubating this project in 2023 and brought in the former Quantum Metric Chief Product Officer earlier this year, who was previously in charge of the Salesforce observability business. Kartik Chandrayana now takes on the role of CEO. Today, Empirik has transformed from an incubated project into an independent company.
Product tracking system change risks
The core product of Empirik is used to track system changes and infer the potential chain reactions these changes may have throughout the entire infrastructure. According to Sequoia, many existing observability tools struggle to identify dependencies between complex systems, and Empirik attempts to fill this gap.
The company positions its product as having a level of automated operations and maintenance capability: it allows low-risk changes, sets restrictions on larger changes, and issues alerts for high-risk updates, which are then reviewed manually. The goal is to enable DevOps and the site reliability engineering team to reduce repetitive troubleshooting work and redirect their time to tasks of higher priority.
Has attracted multiple corporate clients
Empirik indicates that since the company launched its product earlier this year, its clients have included startups as well as several Fortune 500 companies, such as S& P Global, Guardant Health, and a large consumer goods company.
In terms of financing, this round of $21 million in seed funding was participated in by Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The company stated that as AI accelerates the software development pace, the frequency of system changes faced by the infrastructure team is also increasing, and there is a growing demand for tools that can identify potential failure risks in advance.
In terms of competition, Sequoia believes that Empirik is currently more of a supplementary layer that can be used in parallel with Resolve, Traversal, and other AI SRE platforms, rather than simply replacing existing tools.
