Efrat Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — emerged from stealth on Monday to announce June, a startup aimed at simplifying how large organizations deploy AI. The company’s approach is designed to reduce reliance on forward‑deployed engineers (FDEs) who are often brought into enterprises to get AI systems working with legacy IT.
Funding and backers
June raised $20 million in pre‑seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional support from technology figures including Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
Founders' background
All four founders previously launched Bonobo AI, which introduced a voice‑to‑text service in 2017 and was acquired by Salesforce two years later. After working on Salesforce’s AI initiatives for several years, the team left to address a recurring problem they had observed: customers struggling to integrate AI with their existing platforms.
The integration problem June targets
Rapoport says AI has paradoxically increased demand for professional services, because bringing models into production in a real enterprise setting requires working through fragmented data, complex workflows and years of technical debt across systems such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks and Workday. Building an agent template is comparatively easy; the harder task is making it function on top of messy legacy systems, for example when multiple duplicate database fields exist and different teams use them inconsistently.
What June’s platform does
June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to map business processes and identify bottlenecks. It then proposes and constructs agent‑powered, optimized processes to replace inefficient ones, and notifies teams via the organization’s communication channels. The product provides a step‑by‑step implementation roadmap — for instance: “remove these duplicates, connect to this data source” — and lets users click “build” on each task to have June start executing the work inside the organization.
Early customer experience: CMG
Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, said his engineering team moved quickly to Claude Code but stalled when trying to integrate it with Salesforce. He had promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the previous year to return with 100 running agents and was at risk of missing that goal. After weeks of meetings with architects and consultations with FDEs without progress, June helped by clarifying where agents should be deployed and enabling safe rollouts — in some cases before an official kickoff call between the companies.
Complementary tool or FDE replacement?
Rapoport frames June as complementary to FDEs and consultants, but some customers may prefer it specifically because it reduces the need to hire specialized, on‑site engineers. Akinmade said he didn’t want a product that required FDEs or functioned as a black box; he wanted an easy‑to‑use, transparent tool — and June met that bar.
Why it matters
As enterprises increase their AI usage, the practical difficulties of integrating models with legacy systems threaten to slow adoption. June aims to automate many of the discovery, mapping and implementation steps that today rely on expert labor, potentially accelerating enterprise AI deployments and lowering dependence on expensive specialist teams.
Based on June’s announcement and customer comments; article contains company‑reported details and client testimony.
