Empirik: Predicting Outages Before They Happen
A Sequoia-incubated startup spins out with $21M to turn infrastructure engineers into autonomous "traffic cops" for system changes.
Published: 2026-09-02 Category: Quick Take Sources: TechCrunch
The news
Empirik is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The startup was incubated inside Sequoia starting in 2023, born from an insight by two Sequoia IT leaders — Avon Puri (a decade-plus running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware) and Sudheer Dhurjati — that LLMs could autonomously solve a chronic infrastructure problem: preventing outages before they occur.
The product tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure. Rather than reacting to failures after the fact, it acts as an autonomous "traffic cop" — permitting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on larger ones, and flagging the most dangerous updates for human review. Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.
Since launching, Empirik has signed customers from startups to Fortune 500 players, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major CPG company.
Why it matters
The framing is the interesting part: Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers — automate the routine so engineers can work dramatically faster. That's a shift in how we think about observability. Traditional tools tell you something is broken; Empirik's bet is that AI can tell you something is about to break, and even decide which changes are safe to let through.
The "traffic cop" model is a meaningful step toward agentic infrastructure management. It's not full autonomy — the most dangerous changes still go to humans — but it's a graded autonomy that offloads the bulk of routine troubleshooting. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky's point is sharp: 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.
The risk is trust. Letting an AI gatekeep infrastructure changes is a big ask for risk-averse SRE teams, and the "flag for human review" threshold will define whether this is genuinely useful or just another alerting tool with a fancy front end. But the direction — predictive, autonomous, change-aware infrastructure — is clearly where the industry is heading.
Source: TechCrunch, "Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen" (Sep 1, 2026).