Empirik

Empirik.ai provides an AI-powered platform designed for proactive infrastructure change management, enabling enterprises to prevent system incidents before they occur. The company emerged from stealth on September 2, 2026, announcing a $21 million seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital, S32, Canapi Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.

The venture was initiated within Sequoia Capital in 2023 by co-founders Avon Puri, former Chief Digital and Information Officer at Sequoia with prior infrastructure leadership roles at Rubrik and VMware, and Sudheer Dhurjati, an IT leader. They recognized that AI could shift infrastructure operations from being reactive to proactive. Kartik Chandrayana, who previously led over 30 infrastructure products at Salesforce and served as Chief Product Officer at Quantum Metric, was appointed CEO in early 2026.

Empirik's platform addresses the operational bottleneck created when AI-driven software development outpaces manual infrastructure governance. It functions as an AI agent that understands the intent behind an infrastructure change requested via a pull request, ticket, or pipeline. The system then projects this change across the entire live environment—spanning public cloud, on-premise systems, Kubernetes, VMs, and SaaS applications—to deterministically compute its potential impact or "blast radius" before deployment. This allows the platform to act as an autonomous gatekeeper; it can automatically approve low-risk changes, apply guardrails to larger ones, or escalate high-risk modifications for human review. By treating change events as a primary signal and using an "infrastructure compiler" to create a live operational model, the company helps engineering teams move from reactive firefighting to proactive execution.

The company serves clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 corporations, including Guardant Health, S&P Global, and TCBPay. Its business model is centered on providing this change observability platform to DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering teams who manage increasingly complex and rapidly changing systems.

Keywords: AI infrastructure, change management, proactive observability, infrastructure automation, DevOps, SRE, blast radius analysis, incident prevention, system risk detection, infrastructure compiler, CI/CD, cloud governance, Kubernetes management, pre-deployment analysis, AI agent, autonomous infrastructure, configuration drift, access control, enterprise software, Sequoia Capital, Kartik Chandrayana, Avon Puri, Sudheer Dhurjati