AI-Powered Outage Prevention Gets a $21M Boost
Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began showing their true potential, Puri, alongside another Sequoia IT leader, Sudheer Dhurjati, recognized that AI could help autonomously solve a major challenge for infrastructure engineers: preventing tech outages before they occur.
The two tech veterans realized that instead of reacting to system failures after the fact, they could build a tool to predict tech outages and prevent them proactively. This insight led them to build Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.
From Sequoia Incubation to $21M in Funding
Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool that helps prevent and resolve incidents. After incubating the startup in 2023, Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year.
Empirik announced Tuesday that it is spinning out as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. This significant investment underscores the growing demand for AI-driven infrastructure reliability solutions.
How Empirik Works as an Autonomous “Traffic Cop”
“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch, adding that most existing observability tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he claims, is one of the first dedicated tools focused on tracking changes across massive environments.
Empirik acts as an autonomous “traffic cop” for your infrastructure:
Permitting low-risk changes to proceed automatically
Setting guardrails on larger changes to minimize risk
Flagging the most dangerous updates for human review
By serving as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows busy DevOps and site reliability engineering teams to offload routine troubleshooting and focus on higher-value priorities.
Early Adoption by Fortune 500 Companies
Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including:
S&P Global
Guardant Health
A major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company
This diverse customer base demonstrates the broad applicability of Empirik’s technology across different industries and infrastructure scales. The ability to predict tech outages is valuable whether you’re managing healthcare data, financial markets, or global supply chains.
What This Means for Infrastructure Engineers
Empirik’s goal is to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers: automate certain tasks so they can work significantly faster. As AI accelerates the pace of software development, tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant system changes are more vital than ever, Chandrayana told TechCrunch.
“What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he added. The platform essentially functions as an autonomous infrastructure engineer that can predict tech outages by analyzing the complex web of dependencies across modern systems.
The Growing Challenge of Infrastructure Complexity
Modern IT environments are more complex than ever before. Organizations often run thousands of interconnected services, microservices, and legacy systems simultaneously. A seemingly minor change in one component can cascade into a catastrophic failure across the entire stack.
Traditional observability tools excel at telling you what broke after it happens. However, they offer limited capabilities to predict tech outages before they occur. This reactive approach means teams are constantly fighting fires rather than preventing them.
Empirik addresses this gap by:
Continuously monitoring system changes in real-time
Building dependency maps across the entire infrastructure
Applying AI models to assess risk levels of proposed changes
Providing actionable recommendations for safer deployments
The Competitive Landscape
As for competition, Balkansky claims Empirik is in a category of its own for now, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. Rather than competing directly with existing observability tools, Empirik fills a critical gap by predicting issues before they cause downtime.
This complementary approach makes Empirik particularly valuable. Organizations don’t need to rip and replace their current monitoring solutions. Instead, they can add Empirik to enhance their existing stack with proactive outage prediction capabilities.
Why Predictive Infrastructure Matters Now
The ability to predict tech outages before they happen represents a paradigm shift in how organizations approach system reliability. With the accelerating pace of AI-driven development, infrastructure complexity continues to grow exponentially. Tools like Empirik that can autonomously understand system dependencies and predict potential failure points are becoming essential for modern DevOps teams.
Key Benefits for Organizations
Reduced downtime and its associated costs, which can reach millions per hour for large enterprises
Improved engineering productivity by reducing firefighting and emergency response time
Increased system reliability through proactive change management and risk assessment
Better resource allocation as teams focus on innovation rather than troubleshooting
Enhanced customer satisfaction through more stable and reliable services
The Financial Impact
For Fortune 500 companies, even a few minutes of downtime can result in substantial revenue loss and reputational damage. The ability to predict tech outages before they occur therefore represents not just a technical improvement but a significant business advantage.
S&P Global, Guardant Health, and major CPG companies are already leveraging Empirik’s capabilities to protect their critical systems. This early adoption validates the platform’s value proposition across diverse sectors.
The Future of AI-Powered Infrastructure Management
As AI continues to transform every aspect of software development, infrastructure engineering is the next frontier. Empirik’s approach of using AI to predict tech outages represents a significant step forward in making systems more resilient and reliable.
The company’s $21 million seed round and Sequoia’s continued backing suggest strong confidence in this vision. For infrastructure engineers and the organizations that rely on them, Empirik offers a promising solution to one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: keeping complex systems running smoothly in an era of unprecedented change and complexity.
As development velocity increases and systems grow more interconnected, the ability to proactively identify and prevent failures will become not just an advantage but a necessity. Empirik is positioning itself at the forefront of this critical evolution in infrastructure management.
