Large enterprises often face significant hurdles in reliably implementing AI tools, leading to the rise of specialized "forward-deployed engineers" (FDEs). These experts are brought in to integrate and operationalize AI systems within companies.
“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” states Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new venture, June, recently emerged from stealth. She observes that the prevailing industry approach to AI implementation is simply to "hire more and more and more people.”
Rapoport, alongside her three co-founders—Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat—proposes a distinct strategy for broader AI adoption. To advance this vision, June secured $20 million in pre-seed funding, spearheaded by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional investments from notable tech figures such as Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. The company chose not to disclose its valuation.
The four founders previously established Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was acquired by Salesforce two years later, and the team subsequently spent several years contributing to the tech giant's AI initiatives. Their decision to strike out on their own again was prompted by witnessing firsthand the difficulties customers encountered in integrating AI into their existing platforms.
The founders' potential was so evident to investors, Rapoport revealed, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”
While some software firms fear a "SaaSpocalypse" where AI might replace their offerings, the reality is that no AI is currently "vibe-coding" a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model deployed in an corporate environment must seamlessly interface with established data-management platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, and Workday, among many others.
“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport emphasizes. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”
She explains that building an AI agent template is straightforward; the true challenge lies in making it function effectively within the underlying complexity. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”
June's platform addresses this by scanning a company's existing systems to map out business processes, identify inefficiencies, and then generate optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them. These new processes automatically inform relevant teams via the company’s communication channels.
“We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport detailed. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.”
Paul Akinmade, Chief Strategy Officer at CMG, a prominent U.S. mortgage lender, swiftly transitioned his company’s software engineering to Claude Code. However, he encountered significant roadblocks integrating it with Salesforce. This was particularly problematic as he had publicly committed at Salesforce’s annual conference the previous year to return with 100 agents operational, a target that seemed increasingly out of reach. Akinmade recounts that his team spent weeks struggling—meeting with architects, consulting FDEs, and exhausting all available resources—without making progress. June proved to be the turning point, he says, providing his team with clear guidance on agent deployment and enabling safe implementation, even before the official partnership kickoff.
While Rapoport views June as a complementary tool for FDEs and consultants, her customers appear to be drawn to it for a different reason: its potential to eliminate the need for FDEs entirely.
Akinmade recalls his initial conversation with Rapoport when considering piloting June at CMG: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.”
Evidently, June successfully met his stringent criteria.
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