New startup June tackles enterprise AI integration without forward-deployed engineers

Deploying artificial intelligence in large organizations remains a bottleneck. The challenge is so acute that entire teams of specialists—forward-deployed engineers—have become a growth industry, dropping into companies to handle the messy work of making AI actually function within existing systems.

June, a newly public startup founded by former Salesforce AI executive Efrat Rapoport, wants to automate that process. The company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding from Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, alongside backing from Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz.

The Real Problem: Legacy Systems#

The core issue facing enterprises isn't building AI agents—that's relatively straightforward. The friction comes from integrating those agents with tangled legacy environments. Companies operate across fragmented data sources, duplicate database fields, complex workflows, and years of accumulated technical debt spread across platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.

Rapoport describes the scenario: "You have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them." An AI agent needs to navigate this chaos reliably.

How June Works#

June's platform automatically scans a company's existing systems to map business processes, identify bottlenecks, and generate a step-by-step implementation roadmap. The system then guides teams through remediation—cleaning up duplicates, connecting data sources—and builds optimized, agent-powered workflows.

"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," Rapoport explains.

Case in Point: CMG#

A test deployment with CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, illustrated the value. The company's software engineering team had quickly adopted Claude Code but hit integration walls with Salesforce. After weeks of meetings with architects and forward-deployed engineers yielded little progress, June provided visibility into where agents could be safely deployed.

CMG's chief strategy officer Paul Akinmade was explicit about his requirement: "If your product requires FDEs, I don't want your product." He wanted a tool his team could actually use, not a black box requiring outside specialists.

Positioning#

While June's founder frames the platform as complementary to consultants and FDEs, customers may be drawn to it for the inverse reason—the chance to skip expensive external expertise altogether. The company's founding team previously built Bonobo AI, a voice-to-text startup acquired by Salesforce in 2019, giving them deep insight into how enterprises struggle with AI implementation.