Empirik, incubated inside Sequoia Capital since 2023 by former infrastructure executives Avon Puri and Sudheer Dhurjati, is now launching as an independent company with $21 million in seed funding from Sequoia, Canapi, and Alumni Ventures. The startup, now led by CEO Kartik Chandrayana, builds software that monitors infrastructure changes and predicts how they might cascade into failures before they happen. It already counts startups and Fortune 500 firms like S&P Global among its customers.
Israeli startup AIR, founded by former Unit 8200 cybersecurity officers Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, has raised $50 million across two seed rounds to build a platform that monitors and vets the skills, plugins, and MCP servers that AI agents use inside companies. The rounds, led by Sequoia and Greenoaks respectively, closed weeks apart and included several notable angel investors from the cybersecurity world.
Clipto, a San Francisco-based startup with teams in Singapore and Hong Kong, closed a $15 million all-equity funding round that values the company at $250 million. The startup's software indexes videos, audio, images, and meeting recordings stored on a user's computer, letting people find files by describing them in natural language or through AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude. Founder Henry Kang, whose prior startup ZenVideo was acquired by Tencent in 2020, built Clipto around the idea that AI has created a glut of unused content rather than a shortage of it.
Apple has pushed out RC 2 builds for macOS Tahoe 26.7 (build 25G224) and macOS Sequoia 15.8 (build 24H20) to developers, alongside the seventh developer beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate. The update follows last week's first release candidate, which leaked footage and details about upcoming AirPods with cameras using Visual Intelligence.
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