Predictive Outage Detection: Can Empirik Solve the IT Ops Scaling Crisis?

For years, the enterprise software playbook for system stability has been reactive: monitor for a failure, alert the team, and scramble to remediate. However, as AI accelerates the pace of software development, the volume of system changes is creating a scaling crisis that traditional observability tools are struggling to manage.

As TechCrunch first reported, a new startup called Empirik is attempting to shift this paradigm by focusing on predictive outage detection. Founded by Avon Puri—formerly of Rubrik and VMware—and Sudheer Dhurjati, Empirik is designed to track system changes and infer potential ripple effects across an entire infrastructure before a failure occurs. The tool functions as an autonomous "traffic cop," which allows low-risk changes to proceed, establishes guardrails for larger updates, and flags high-risk changes for human intervention.

From an operational ROI perspective, the value proposition is clear: by acting as an autonomous infrastructure engineer, Empirik allows DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams to offload routine troubleshooting and refocus on higher-value priorities. CEO Kartik Chandrayana, who previously served as CPO at Quantum Metric and VP of observability at Salesforce, told TechCrunch that Empirik aims to do for infrastructure engineering what tools like Claude Code and Cursor have done for software developers by automating tedious tasks to increase speed.

Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch that most current observability tools fail to grasp complex system dependencies. He claims Empirik is one of the first tools dedicated to tracking changes across massive environments. While the market includes AI SRE platforms such as Resolve and the Sequoia-backed Traversal, Balkansky positions Empirik as a complementary layer rather than a direct replacement.

Empirik is spinning out as an independent company after being incubated by Sequoia in 2023. On Tuesday, the company revealed it secured $21 million in seed funding provided by Alumni Ventures, Canapi, and Sequoia. The startup has already secured a customer base that spans from early-stage companies to Fortune 500 entities, including Guardant Health, S&P Global, and an unnamed major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company.

**Renee's Take:** In my view, predictive detection is the only viable path to solving the modern IT ops scaling crisis. Reactive monitoring is a losing game when the rate of change is this high. However, Empirik's long-term success depends on its ability to prove a tangible ROI over traditional tools—specifically, whether it can measurably reduce downtime and headcount costs compared to the legacy observability stack.