Talks to sell PayPal to Stripe and Advent are heating up

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. The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years 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. Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.” While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms. “Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “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 hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “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 understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms 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, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target. Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall — meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could — without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them 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 avoid 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 I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something

In Brief Posted: 3:40 PM PDT · July 23, 2026 Image Credits:Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg / Getty Images Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua plans to step down from the top leadership post after nearly three decades, just as the company pushes into robotaxis and humanoid robots. Shashua will remain CEO until Mobileye hires a replacement, according to a regulatory filing Thursday. Mobileye got its start making computer vision chips based on Shashua’s academic research at Hebrew University in Israel, and grew into a major supplier of the chips that power automotive safety and driver-assistance features. It had the largest IPO in Israel’s history, was acquired in 2017 by Intel for $15.3 billion, then spun back out as a publicly traded company in 2022, though Intel remains its largest shareholder. Under Shashua, Mobileye also moved beyond selling chips to automakers and began building its own systems that handle autonomous driving, which it now supplies to Volkswagen and its MOIA subsidiary. In January, the company acquired Shashua’s humanoid robotics startup Mentee Robotics for $900 million, which Shashua called part of “Mobileye 3.0,” the next phase of the business focused on robotics and automotive AI. Mobileye also said in June it would expand beyond its supplier status to launch its own robotaxi service in a U.S. city in 2027. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in Transportation