The entrepreneur who sold a company to Salesforce raised 20 million dollars from Marc Benioff and Michael Dell
Efrat Rapoport, who previously sold Bonobo AI to Salesforce, has returned with a new startup, June AI. The company raised 20 million dollars in a Pre-Seed round led by Marc Benioff and Michael Dell.
Efrat Rapoport has already previously recorded an exit of tens of millions of dollars to the CRM giant Salesforce, a deal that led her to manage the company's Israeli development center. Now she is returning to the world of entrepreneurship and is raising a Pre-Seed round of unusual scale, led by none other than Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and yes, her former big boss.
The Israeli startup June (or June AI) was revealed today, Monday, with a raise of 20 million dollars in a Pre-Seed round. The round was led by the Time Ventures fund of Marc Benioff, with the participation of Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies; George Kurtz, founder and CEO of CrowdStrike; Israeli venture investor Yasmin Lukatz, alongside other funds and investors.
The company was founded by Rapoport (CEO), Idan Citiat (CTO), Barak Goldstein (President) and Ohad Chen (Chief Architect). If the names sound familiar, it is because this is the same team of founders that established Bonobo AI, which was sold to Salesforce for about 50 million dollars in 2019. The four worked together at the company for five years and left together.
When they led the development of AI products for organizations, they were exposed to a problem that repeated itself in almost every project: organizations invested in advanced technologies but struggled to integrate them into existing systems. From this insight, the new startup was born.
Solving the end-to-end integration problem
While most AI tools focus on only one system, the June platform maps the business process from end to end. It understands how the systems work together and allows for the integration of AI tools continuously, while automatically adapting to changes in the organization. The company explains that as more organizations adopt AI, the need for professional integration actually grows. As evidence, this is a field that a series of large players are targeting by sending Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), whose role is to assist clients in connecting the tools within the organization.
"Paradoxically, artificial intelligence has created more demand for integration services, not less," said Efrat Rapoport, CEO of June AI. "Organizations are no longer asking whether to use AI, but how to make it work within complex systems that have existed for years. They are investing billions in new models, but are forced to deal with outdated processes, scattered data, and a huge technical debt. This is exactly the problem we are solving. June not only recommends what needs to be done, but also performs the integration, ensures it continues to work over time, and adapts it continuously to changes in the organization."
At June AI, they note that they are already working with partners and clients around the world and employ about 20 workers, most of them in Israel.
