Enterprises are struggling to bring AI tools into production. The market has responded by creating a new role: forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, who embed with customers and build custom integrations for AI systems. But June, a startup founded by former Salesforce executives, believes AI itself can handle much of that work.

“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, June’s CEO and co-founder. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people’.”

June emerged from stealth Monday morning with $20 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with backing from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, George Kurtz, and other prominent tech investors. The company declined to share its valuation.

Rapoport and her three co-founders, Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat, previously launched Bonobo AI, a voice-to-text service built before the rise of transformer-based language models. That company was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. The team spent several years working on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before going out on their own again, driven by what they saw as a persistent problem: customers could not get AI to work inside their existing platforms.

Rapoport says the strength of the team made it an easy raise. “We didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”

Key facts at a glance

• June is an enterprise AI deployment startup founded by former Salesforce executives, including CEO Efrat Rapoport.
• The company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures.
• Other investors include Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz.
• June scans existing systems, identifies bottlenecks, and builds agent-powered workflows.
• Early customer CMG used June to help integrate Claude Code with Salesforce.

Why enterprise AI is still hard

The hype around AI agents has run ahead of reality. While software vendors rush to add generative AI features, most large companies operate with data scattered across Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, Workday, and a dozen other systems. These platforms were not designed to talk to each other cleanly, and years of customization have made the problem worse.

“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”

That reality has created a busy market for implementation consultants and forward-deployed engineers. But hiring more people to solve integration problems is expensive and slow. June’s founders argue that AI can be used to untangle the very mess that makes AI hard to deploy.

How June works

June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them. Instead of requiring months of consulting work, June automatically recommends a step-by-step implementation plan and can start building each piece inside the organization.

“Building an agent template is easy,” Rapoport says. The hard part is adapting it to messy environments. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”

Rapoport says June gives every customer a full roadmap: remove duplicate data, connect to the right source, configure security policies, and then deploy. Each task can be executed with a click, and June handles the construction

Source: TechCrunch News