June thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem; plus, Base Power raises another $1B to save the grid using backyard batteries

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0:50So you can focus on other important things, like savoring that last bit of pumpkin pie. From early startups to Fortune 500 companies, thousands are turning to Framer to build a website they'll love. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. So it's kind of hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward deployed engineers or FDEs, who are specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running, are springing up to help them.

1:39Efrat Rappaport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from Stealth on Monday, said, AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services. The industry's answer to AI implementation is, let's hire more and more and more people. Rappaport and her three co-founders 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 Mark Benioff's Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levy, and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.

2:25The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service back 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, Rappaport says, that we did not 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.

3:12Any 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. Rappaport said, Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems. 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. 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.

4:01Rappaport said, 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. 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. Rappaport 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. One company's chief financial officer that switched his company over to June said that if your product requires FDEs, I don't want your product.

4:47I've already done that, and I'm getting annoyed by it. I don't want a black box. I don't want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool. Where most energy storage companies look for big tracks of land near large connections to the grid, BasePower is betting that it can beat them all by putting batteries in people's backyards instead. And it appears to be paying off, with BasePower installing more than 500 megawatt hours of storage over the past few years. The startup announced on Monday that it has raised another$1 billion, less than a year after its last billion-dollar round.

5:31The Series D values the company at a$13 billion post-money valuation. BasePower is installing about 100 batteries a day. That's according to the Wall Street Journal, and it hopes to double that by the end of this year. Now, that works out to about eight megawatt hours of storage installed per day. BasePower also rolled out a new version of its home battery called BaseCore. The device is built at its Austin, Texas factory, and it can store 39.2 kilowatt hours of electricity, significantly more than those of its competitors. Customers can choose either one or two batteries. Base power operates in Texas and Illinois.

6:14The round arrives as electricity demand has been skyrocketing due to economy-wide electrification and the rapid pace of AI data center construction. Over the last several years, the U.S. electrical grid has expanded after decades of stagnation. The surge in demand has strained the grid in many locations, most notably PJM, which hosts a large number of data centers. Portions of Illinois, where BasePower operates, are part of PJM's territory. Rather than charge thousands of dollars up front, as most home battery installers do, BasePower offers its batteries on a subscription basis. In the Houston area, for example, BasePower charges customers$700 to install a single battery,$19 a month, and 13.1 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, which is about the going rate in the region.

7:13BasePower, which owns the battery, sells stored electricity back to the grid during periods of high demand. Such services can pay handsomely. In regulated markets, BasePower works with utilities to place batteries in customers' homes to alleviate strain on the local grid. In both regulated and deregulated markets, homeowners can use the batteries to power their homes in case of blackouts. At nearly 40 kilowatt hours, the batteries can provide backup power for a day or more. The new round was led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorgan Chase's Strategic Investment Group, with participation from Altimeter, D1 Capital Partners, Sands Capital, Andresen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed, and others.

8:05That's all for now. For the latest in tech news, go to techcrunch.com.

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