«Empirik» Launches with $21 Million in Funding to Predict System Failures Before They Happen

Imagine if technical infrastructure engineers could identify a failure before it happens, instead of waiting until the system crashes and then scrambling to fix it. This is precisely the idea that a new startup called Empirik seeks to turn into reality, after announcing its spinoff into an independent entity with $21 million in seed funding.

From Sequoia Incubation to an Independent Company

The idea was born within the renowned investment firm Sequoia Capital, where Avon Bori served as director of technology and digital information. Bori has more than a decade of experience managing infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware. Three years ago, as large language models began demonstrating their true capabilities, Bori—in collaboration with his colleague Sudhir Durgati—recognized that AI could solve an old problem that has long troubled systems engineers: preventing failures before they occur.

The two experts realized that better than handling system failures after they happen is predicting them in advance. From this came the idea of Empirik, a tool that monitors changes made to systems and infers their potential cascading effects across the entire infrastructure.

Sequoia incubated the company in 2023, then early this year recruited Kartik Chandrayana to take on the role of CEO. He previously served as head of products at Quantum Metric and vice president of monitoring at Salesforce. Finally, the company announced its spinoff as an independent entity, with funding obtained from Sequoia, Kanabi, and Alumni Ventures.

A Tool That Acts as a «Traffic Cop» for Systems

Bogomil Balkansky, a partner at Sequoia, believes that companies always spend enormous sums to keep their systems running without interruption, yet most current monitoring tools fail to understand the complex interdependencies between system components. He describes Empirik as one of the first tools dedicated exclusively to tracking changes across massive technical environments.

The tool works much like a self-operating «traffic cop,» handling the following tasks:

• Automatically allowing low-risk changes without human intervention.
• Placing controls and limits on larger changes.
• Flagging the most dangerous updates and referring them for human review.

With this role resembling an automated infrastructure engineer, Empirik enables overburdened DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to shed routine troubleshooting tasks and focus on more valuable priorities.

Clients from Startups to Fortune 500 Lists

Since its launch earlier this year, Empirik has attracted a diverse range of clients, from small startups to several companies on the Fortune 500 list, including S&P Global and Guardant Health, alongside a major consumer packaged goods company.

The company's leaders summarize their ambition in a clear statement: they want to achieve what tools like Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers, but this time for infrastructure engineers, by automating specific tasks that enable them to work much faster.

Why Is Demand for Such Tools Growing?

Chandrayana points out that the accelerating pace of software development thanks to AI makes tools that help infrastructure engineers keep up with constant changes more important than ever. He says: «What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering.»

On the competitive front, Balkansky believes the company currently belongs to a category of its own, functioning as a complementary layer to AI-based site reliability platforms such as Resolve and Traversal. As organizations increasingly rely on complex, interconnected systems, the market for predictive monitoring tools appears poised for remarkable growth in the coming years.

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