Marc Benioff backs June, startup automating AI deployment for enterprises

On Monday morning, June emerged from stealth to announce $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures. The startup was founded by Efrat Rapoport, Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat—all of whom previously worked at Bonobo AI, a voice-to-text company acquired by Salesforce in 2019. After spending several years on Salesforce's AI initiatives, the team observed a recurrent problem: large businesses were struggling to integrate AI tools into their existing platforms and wanted a different solution.

Rapoport frames the core tension as a paradox: "AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services," she says. Rather than automating away the need for specialist implementation support, AI deployment has instead spawned a new category of workers—forward-deployed engineers (FDEs)—who are dropped into companies to get their AI systems running. June's answer is to automate much of that work by scanning a company's systems automatically. The platform identifies business processes, locates bottlenecks, and builds agent-powered workflows to replace them. It surfaces the mess underneath: fragmented data across platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, and Workday; duplicate database fields; complex legacy workflows; and years of accumulated technical debt. "Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems," Rapoport explains. "You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt."

June's platform addresses this by generating a roadmap automatically. As Rapoport describes it: "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. 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." The system notifies teams through their communications channels as it works.

CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, became an early validator of the approach. Paul Akinmade, CMG's chief strategy officer, had migrated the company's engineering work to Claude Code but hit roadblocks integrating the tool with Salesforce. He had promised at Salesforce's annual conference the previous year that he would return with 100 agents running—a target that looked impossible after his team spent weeks meeting with architects and forward-deployed engineers without progress. June provided a breakthrough: it gave his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and let them do so safely before the official launch between the two companies. When Akinmade was first evaluating the product, he made his requirements clear: "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." June met that bar.

The funding round included backing from tech luminaries beyond Benioff—Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz all participated. Notably, Rapoport says the company raised the round without even preparing a traditional pitch deck, a testament to the clarity of the problem and the credibility of the team. While some in the software industry have worried that AI might replace software platforms, the reality, as Rapoport notes, is that no one is yet "vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company." Any AI brought into a corporate setting still must work with the existing ecosystem—a constraint that June is built to solve.