June raises $20M pre-seed to help enterprises deploy AI agents

Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive, has co-founded a startup called June with Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat. The company emerged from stealth Monday morning with $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. June declined to share its valuation, and Rapoport said investor interest was strong enough that the founders didn’t prepare a pitch deck for the raise.

The same four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched 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 initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.

Rapoport argues that AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services, since most companies’ answer to AI implementation has been to hire more people — forward-deployed engineers who parachute in to get systems running. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with existing platforms such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks, or Workday, and the fragmented data, complex workflows, and years of technical debt inside those systems, not the AI agent template itself, are what make deployment hard, she said.

June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to map its business processes, find bottlenecks, and build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s communications channels. Rapoport said the platform generates a step-by-step implementation roadmap — telling a customer, for instance, to remove duplicate database fields or connect a specific data source — and the customer can click “build” on each task for June to execute inside the organization.

Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, said his team spent weeks stuck trying to integrate Claude Code with Salesforce after he had promised at a Salesforce conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running. June gave his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and let them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies, he said. Akinmade told Rapoport plainly: “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.”

Why it matters

June’s pitch signals that the bottleneck for enterprise AI isn’t building agents but making them work with the legacy systems large companies already run — a problem that has fueled a parallel industry of forward-deployed engineers. Investors including Michael Dell and Aaron Levie backing a company that promises to reduce reliance on those specialists suggests appetite for tools that cut the services overhead AI adoption has created.