Empirik Secures $21M to Automate Infrastructure Outage Prevention

Infrastructure engineers face a relentless cycle of system failures, but former Sequoia Capital executives Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati believe AI can break the pattern. Their startup, Empirik, officially launched Tuesday with $21 million in seed funding to predict and intercept potential outages before they disrupt production environments.

Business Faces·September 1, 2026·reads: 2,463

Empirik Secures $21M to Automate Infrastructure Outage Prevention

The platform functions as an autonomous traffic controller for complex digital systems. By monitoring infrastructure changes and mapping their ripple effects, Empirik identifies high-risk updates, enforces guardrails, and flags dangerous modifications for human intervention. The goal is to move beyond reactive troubleshooting, allowing DevOps teams to delegate routine oversight to the AI.

Sequoia incubated the startup in 2023, eventually recruiting Kartik Chandrayana—formerly of Quantum Metric and Salesforce—to lead the company as CEO. The firm’s investment strategy highlights a shift in observability; Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky notes that traditional tools struggle with the massive, interconnected dependencies of modern environments. Empirik positions itself as a specialized layer that complements existing SRE platforms rather than replacing them.

Early adoption suggests significant demand for this automation. The company has already onboarded a diverse client roster, including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and various Fortune 500 consumer goods firms. Chandrayana likens the tool’s impact to the shift seen in software development, where agentic AI has fundamentally accelerated coding workflows. By handling the heavy lifting of infrastructure health, Empirik aims to provide engineers the same velocity gains currently enjoyed by software developers.