Empirik emerges from stealth with $21M seed to foresee infrastructure failures

Empirik, a startup incubated within Sequoia Capital, has raised $21 million in seed funding to help companies anticipate and prevent IT outages. The platform monitors system changes and models their potential downstream effects, acting as an autonomous guardrail for infrastructure updates. Early customers include S&P Global and Guardant Health, and the company aims to automate routine troubleshooting for DevOps teams.

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The startup's founding team brings deep infrastructure experience: Puri spent over a decade at Rubrik and VMware before joining Sequoia as chief digital and information officer in 2020, while Dhurjati served in Sequoia's IT leadership. The company was incubated inside Sequoia beginning in 2023, with Chandrayana recruited as CEO earlier this year from his roles at Quantum Metric and Salesforce.

Empirik's approach centers on change tracking rather than traditional monitoring. The platform models how system modifications ripple through complex environments, automatically permitting low-risk updates while flagging dangerous ones for human review. Early adopters span healthcare, financial data, and consumer goods sectors, including S&P Global and Guardant Health,