Sequoia Capital has spun out Empirik, an AI startup that wants to do for infrastructure engineers what Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers. The company announced a $21 million seed round on Tuesday from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
The origin story is unusual even by Silicon Valley standards. Avon Puri, Sequoia’s chief digital and information officer, and Sudheer Dhurjati, another IT leader at the firm, started building the tool internally after realizing large language models could predict system failures rather than just react to them. Empirik tracks changes across infrastructure and infers how those changes ripple through dependencies — a problem most observability tools simply wave at.
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky put it bluntly: existing tools fail to understand complex system dependencies. Empirik, he said, acts as an autonomous traffic cop — greenlighting low-risk changes, setting guardrails on bigger ones, and flagging dangerous updates for human review. The pitch is that DevOps and SRE teams can offload routine troubleshooting and actually focus on work that matters.
Since launching earlier this year, the company has signed customers including S&P Global, Guardant Health, and an unnamed major CPG company. Former Quantum Metric CPO Kartik Chandrayana came aboard as CEO earlier this year, and he frames the mission as a direct response to AI accelerating software development. “What agentic AI did for software, Empirik wants to do for infrastructure engineering,” he told TechCrunch.
Balkansky claims Empirik sits in a category of its own for now, positioning it as complementary to AI SRE platforms like Resolve and Sequoia-backed Traversal. That’s a bold claim, but the Sequoia stamp — both as incubator and lead investor — gives it more weight than the typical seed-stage pitch. The real test will be whether the Fortune 500 early adopters stick around after the novelty wears off.
