Big businesses struggle to get AI tools running reliably, so new organizations of forward‑deployed engineers (FDEs) are springing up to help. June, a Marc Benioff‑backed startup, says the paradox is that AI actually raises the need for professional services. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more people,’” explains Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive.\n\nRapoport and her three co‑founders – Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat – have a different idea. To pursue it, June raised $20 million in pre‑seed funding led by Time Ventures, with extra backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz.

The four founders previously launched Bonobo AI, a pre‑transformer language‑model company that sold a voice‑to‑text service in 2017 and was later acquired by Salesforce.\n\nAI models still need to mesh with legacy platforms such as Salesforce, Service Now, Data Bricks, Workday, etc. Before AI can create value, someone must untangle fragmented data, duplicate fields and technical debt. June’s platform scans existing systems, maps processes, finds bottlenecks and then builds agent‑powered workflows. It automatically gives a step‑by‑step roadmap: remove duplicates, connect data sources and click ‘build’ so the agent assembles itself.\n\nPaul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, faced integration roadblocks with Claude Code and Salesforce.

June cleared the path, allowing him to deploy agents safely and avoid the black‑box complexity. The tool complements, not replaces, forward‑deployed engineers.