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 them. This insight led them to build Empirik, a product that tracks system changes and infers their potential ripple effects across the entire infrastructure.

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.

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. 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.

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, and a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. 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. 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.