A Marc Benioff-backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem
Startup June, backed by Marc Benioff, has raised $20 million to address the complexities of deploying AI within large corporate environments. The company aims to help businesses integrate AI models with legacy data systems, which remains a significant hurdle for enterprise adoption.
Why it matters
Enterprise AI adoption is currently bottlenecked by technical debt and fragmented data, creating a new market for specialized integration services.
It’s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs— specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running — are springing up to help them.
“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.”
Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.
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