Empirik

About

Empirik is a Sequoia-incubated “change observability” startup that uses AI to predict infrastructure outages before they occur by tracking every system change entering an enterprise environment and modeling how it will ripple across dependent services ^{1 2}. The platform is positioned as an autonomous “traffic cop” for infrastructure — permitting low-risk changes automatically, adding guardrails to medium-risk ones, and escalating the most dangerous updates to human engineers for review ^{1 3}. The company was incubated inside Sequoia beginning in 2023, spun out as an independent entity on September 1, 2026, and announced a $21M seed round led by Sequoia Capital with participation from S32, Canapi Ventures, and Alumni Ventures ^{1 2 3 4 5}.

Co-founder and CEO Kartik Chandrayana was previously Chief Product Officer at Quantum Metric and Vice President of Observability at Salesforce; Sequoia recruited him to lead Empirik earlier in 2026 ^{1 2}. Co-founder Avon Puri has been Sequoia Capital’s Chief Digital and Information Officer since 2020, following more than a decade running infrastructure at Rubrik and VMware ¹. Co-founder Sudheer Dhurjati is a Sequoia IT leader who worked alongside Puri on the original concept ¹.