Getting AI systems to work reliably in large enterprises is such a challenge that an entire new category of specialists—forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs—has emerged. These experts embed themselves within a company to get its AI infrastructure functioning properly. “AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new venture, June, came out of stealth on Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.’”

Rapoport and her three co-founders—Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat—have a different approach to making AI more widely accessible. To pursue that vision, the company secured $20 million in pre-seed funding, led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional contributions from prominent tech figures like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. The company has not disclosed its valuation. The four founders previously launched Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model firm that introduced a voice-to-text service in 2017. Salesforce acquired Bonobo AI two years later, and the team spent several years working on the tech giant’s AI projects before deciding to strike out on their own again, after witnessing customers struggle to integrate AI into their existing platforms. Their track record was convincing enough for investors that, as Rapoport puts it, “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”

While the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” has software companies worried that AI might replace them, no one is yet vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model deployed in a corporate environment still has to interface with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or a host of other data-management platforms. “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.”

Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The real challenge is getting it to function within the underlying chaos. “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 map out its business processes, identify bottlenecks, and then design more efficient, agent-driven workflows to replace them—automatically notifying teams through 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 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, quickly moved his company’s software engineering onto Claude Code but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem, since he had promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the previous year that he’d return with 100 agents running—and it wasn’t looking like he’d reach that target. Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall—meeting with architects, consulting forward-deployed engineers, and seeking advice from anyone they could—without making headway. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and allowing them to 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 bypass 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 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.