Observed Signal · Sep 1, 2026 · Funding · Source: techcrunch · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Positive
Empirik launches with $21M to predict infrastructure outages
Empirik, a startup incubated by Sequoia Capital, has launched as an independent company after raising $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The company offers an AI-powered observability platform that tracks system changes and infers ripple effects to predict and prevent infrastructure outages before they occur. Co-founded by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, and led by CEO Kartik Chandrayana (formerly CPO at Quantum Metric and observability VP at Salesforce), Empirik positions itself as an autonomous 'traffic cop' for DevOps and SRE teams, automating routine troubleshooting. The company has already onboarded customers including S&P Global and Guardant Health, and aims to bring agentic AI assistance to infrastructure engineering, similar to what tools like Cursor and Claude Code did for software developers.
This funding marks a notable investment in AI-driven infrastructure observability, a category that underpins the stability of AdTech and MarTech systems. The involvement of Sequoia and the adoption by Fortune 500 customers signals growing enterprise demand for autonomous AI operations, which is relevant to the tech infrastructure layer that supports advertising technology.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Empirik raised $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures.
- Empirik was incubated by Sequoia in 2023 and spun out as an independent company in September 2026.
- The product tracks system changes and predicts infrastructure outages before they occur.
- Kartik Chandrayana was appointed CEO earlier this year, previously CPO at Quantum Metric and observability VP at Salesforce.
- Customers include S&P Global, Guardant Health, and a major CPG company.
Connected Companies & Entities
6 Entities mapped“Sequoia recognized that Empirik could be a new type of observability tool that helps prevent and resolve incidents....”
“Since launching earlier this year, Empirik has already brought on customers ranging from startups to several Fortune 500 players, including ...”
“Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2020 as chief digital and information officer, Avon Puri spent over a decade running infrastructure at Rub...”
“Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year....”
“Sequoia recruited former Quantum Metric CPO and Salesforce observability VP Kartik Chandrayana as CEO earlier this year....”
“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-b...”
Ontology Mapping & Concepts
Related Market Signals & Shifts
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