June Startup Secures $20M to Tackle AI Deployment Challenges in Enterprise Software

A Marc Benioff-backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem

It's so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs -- specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running -- are springing up to help them. "AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services," says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. "The industry's answer to AI implementation is, 'let's hire more and more and more people." Rapoport and her three cofounders -- Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat -- have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation. The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant's AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms. Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that "we didn't even have a deck for this raise." While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms. "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." Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. "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 scans a company's existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company's comms 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 said. "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 major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company's software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he'd promised at Salesforce's annual conference the year before that he'd return with 100 agents running, and it wasn't looking like he'd hit that target. Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall -- meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could -- without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether. When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: "If your product requires FDEs, I don't want your product. I've already 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 cleared the bar.

June launches with $20M to speed up enterprise software projects

June.ai Technologies Inc., a startup that uses artificial intelligence to modernize enterprise software environments, launched today with $20 million in funding. The pre-seed round was led by Time Ventures with participation from SV Angel, Vesey Ventures and other funds. They were joined by several prominent angel investors. The group included Michael Dell, VMware co-founder Diane Greene and CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. Chief Executive George Kurtz. June was launched last year by four former Salesforce Inc. executives. They joined the cloud giant in 2019 after it acquired their previous venture, an early AI startup called Bonobo AI Ltd. Time Ventures, the fund that led June's round, is affiliated with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Changing the core applications that an enterprise uses to power its employees' work can be a highly complicated task. The same applies to large-scale AI agent rollouts. As a result, companies often offload some of the work to professional service providers. That can significantly increase the cost of software projects. June offers an AI platform that automates some of the work historically managed by professional service companies. According to the company, its AI can not only reduce the cost of software upgrades but also speed them up. June identifies opportunities to make software upgrades by analyzing data from a company's existing applications. For example, the platform can review employee activity in a support ticket processing system and spot inefficiencies. It also maps out business workflows that span multiple applications. The information in an application doesn't always provide a complete picture of the associated business process. When that's the case, June rounds out the data with feedback from employees. The platform collects the information using a chatbot that asks questions in natural language. Companies can use the data surfaced by June to inform their software development efforts. If the platform shows that a particular subsidiary struggles to keep up with support tickets, engineers could build an AI help desk agent to automate the work. June can also spot inefficiencies in other areas such as supply management and cybersecurity. Once engineers identify a task that they wish to streamline with software upgrades, they can have June implement the necessary changes. The platform takes a natural language description of a business process update as input. It uses AI to implement the update and then runs tests to ensure that the code works as expected. When June modifies a software system or rolls out a new one, it creates a simulated environment in which employees can familiarize themselves with the upgrade. The platform also generates training materials. A built-in support tool enables employees to request help from administrators if the training materials don't cover all their questions. According to June, its platform also automates a number of related tasks. It generates dashboards that track the return on investment of software changes. Another feature automatically spots technical issues that may slow down business workflows. June's platform could create more competition for so-called process mining platforms. Such tools use data from a company's applications to identify business inefficiencies. Celonis SE, one of the biggest players in the process mining market, received a $13 billion valuation following its most recent funding round.