Empirik
Category: AI Infrastructure
Sequoia-incubated AI startup building an autonomous infrastructure engineer that predicts and guardrails infrastructure changes before they cause outages. Empirik was founded in 2023. The company is led by Kartik Chandrayana. Based in San Francisco, California, USA. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $21M. Latest round: Seed. Key investors include Sequoia Capital, S32, Canapi Ventures, Alumni Ventures.
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Team size
- 11-50
- Total funding
- $21M
Value proposition
Empirik is an autonomous AI agent for infrastructure change that captures an engineer's intent at the point of change (PR, ticket, pipeline), maps it across a live compiled infrastructure graph, and shows the blast radius before it lands — acting as a "traffic cop" that permits low-risk changes, guardrails medium-risk ones, and escalates high-risk changes for human review.
Products and solutions
Change Observability Platform / Autonomous Infra Engineer AI agent: Blast Radius (project PRs/change requests onto live environment before approval), Continuous Production Assurance (reconcile intended vs deployed vs runtime state), Unauthorized Change Detection, Waste Optimization, VM Dependency Discovery. Integrates via MCP with Claude and ChatGPT, provider-agnostic across cloud, SaaS, and on-prem.
Unique value
First dedicated tool focused on tracking changes across massive environments — treats "change" as the fourth pillar of observability (vs. symptom-based metrics/logs/traces). Predicts and prevents outages before the first alert fires, unlike post-mortem observability tools.
Target customer
Enterprise DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams at Fortune 500 companies with complex hybrid multi-cloud, on-prem, identity, and SaaS infrastructure stacks.
Industries served
Financial services, healthcare/life sciences, consumer packaged goods (CPG), managed service providers (MSPs), payments.
Technology advantage
Proprietary "infrastructure compiler" that converts metadata from clouds, identity providers, CI/CD, and SaaS systems into a live unified operational graph mapping thousands of relationships between assets and accounts. Built and stress-tested inside Sequoia's own enterprise IT environment. MCP integration for agentic workflows.
How they differentiate
Operates upstream at the change itself rather than reacting to incidents. Intercepts changes in the infrastructure pipeline and models ripple effects across the full dependency graph before deployment, whereas competitors (Resolve, Traversal, Cleric) automate investigation/remediation after an incident begins.
Main competitors
Resolve AI (AI SRE / AI for prod; $125M Series A at $1B Feb 2026, extended to $1.5B valuation Apr 2026), Traversal (Sequoia-backed AI SRE), Cleric, NeuBird AI. Complementary to observability incumbents Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, New Relic.
Key partnerships
Sequoia Capital (incubator and lead investor), MCP integration with Claude (Anthropic) and ChatGPT (OpenAI), Sequoia-backed Traversal (complementary AI SRE platform).
Notable customers
S&P Global, Guardant Health, TCBPay, Avahi (MSP), Auxo AI, a global Fortune-50 CPG company, a Fortune 500 financial enterprise, Sequoia Capital (internal).
Major milestones
2023: Incubated inside Sequoia Capital by Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, Jan 2026: Kartik Chandrayana recruited as CEO, Sep 2026: Spun out as independent company with $21M seed round and Fortune 500 customers.
Growth metrics
Processing millions of raw change and telemetry events weekly over dependency graphs spanning a few million resources across all major clouds and on-prem systems. TCBPay catches sensitive config file changes in 10 seconds (down from 30 minutes).
Market positioning
Early-stage category creator in "change observability" / autonomous infrastructure engineering. Sequoia partner claims it is in a category of its own, acting as a complementary layer to AI SRE platforms. Addresses a market projected to reach 85% enterprise AI SRE adoption by 2029.
Geographic focus
United States (enterprise Fortune 500 focus)
About Kartik Chandrayana
Ex-Quantum Metric CPO; Ex-Salesforce VP of Product for Observability & Big Data (5 yrs); Founder of Twin Prime (sold to Salesforce); Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Official website: https://empirik.ai