A Marc Benioff-backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem
The founders of Bonobo AI and former Salesforce team members launch a new venture to help large enterprises integrate artificial intelligence into complex databases.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures
- Founded by former Bonobo AI team members acquired by Salesforce in 2019
- Focuses on solving corporate database chaos to make AI agents work smoothly
Deploying artificial intelligence tools reliably within large corporations is so challenging that an entirely new category of forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs—specialists who drop into companies to get AI systems operational—has emerged to assist them.
Rapoport and her three cofounders—Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat—have a different vision for bringing artificial intelligence into wider usage. To pursue this goal, the company secured $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech leaders Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
The four founders previously launched Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that released 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 launching out on their own again after watching customers struggle to integrate AI into existing platforms.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
"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?"
Rapoport
While fears surrounding the so-called SaaSpocalypse have software firms worried that AI might replace them, no one has yet successfully vibe-coded a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any artificial intelligence model introduced into a corporate environment still needs to integrate with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or a dozen other data-management platforms.
Enterprise data fragmentation and redundant database fields represent major hurdles in AI adoption, as models cannot make accurate decisions when underlying data sources conflict with one another. Addressing this foundational data infrastructure challenge is crucial before automation systems can operate effectively at scale.
Rapoport views her company's tool as a complement to FDEs and consultants, though customers might ultimately be drawn to it for the exact opposite reason: allowing them to bypass FDEs entirely.
Source: TechCrunch
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