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.
“There has always been a lot of money spent in keeping systems up and running,” Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch,
