Conduct raises $60m to map the custom code buried in SAP estates

On 17 June, London-based Conduct announced a $60m (£44.7m) Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with a strategic investment from SAP, the German software group whose systems Conduct’s product is built to read. Creandum, Lucid Capital and Booom, the investors behind its seed round, put money in again. The round comes nine months after Conduct came out of stealth with a $12m (£8.9m) seed led by Creandum, and takes its total raised to about $72m (£53.7m), according to Tech.eu.

Conduct calls its product an AI operating system for enterprise software. The platform ingests a company’s custom code, configuration and dependencies, and links each step of a business process to the code that runs it. AI agents then analyze the source code and gather knowledge of how and why each system was customized, the company says. The buyers are large companies whose ERP systems, SAP’s above all, have been modified for so long that the code, in the founders’ words, is “opaque even to the people running them”.

The three co-founders, chief executive Jan Philipp Haas, Philipp Höfer and Henry Thompson, all worked at Palantir. In the post announcing the round, they wrote that they saw the same pattern there “in different businesses, in different roles, on different continents”: before a company could change its systems, IT teams spent months reading source code and business teams ran hundreds of interviews with users. “Decisions made in the boardroom were dying in the backlog,” they wrote. Companies House records Conduct AI Ltd’s incorporation on 8 January 2024, with Haas as its first director, and Höfer and Thompson registered as persons with significant control that March. Sahir Azam, the Index Ventures partner who spoke for the firm on the round, joined Index from MongoDB in September 2025.

The round makes SAP a shareholder in a company whose published customer results all come from SAP work, five weeks after SAP named it a strategic AI partner. That puts Conduct inside SAP’s own push to move customers onto its cloud ERP before a 2027 support deadline. The founders’ announcement calls SAP “just our starting point”, and says the $60m will help take Conduct beyond it.

SAP as backer and sales channel

On 12 May, at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, Conduct said SAP had named it a strategic AI partner for SAP Cloud ERP transformation, and that it was on track to become an SAP Endorsed App listed on the SAP Store. “Helping our customers migrate faster is one of SAP’s most important priorities,” Sebastian Steinhaeuser, SAP’s chief operating officer and a member of its executive board, said in the announcement. “Conduct is a key enabler for this transition.”

The same month, Conduct announced partnerships with Boston Consulting Group and with NTT DATA Business Solutions, one of the larger SAP system integrators. Under the second deal, NTT DATA Business Solutions embeds Conduct’s platform across its S/4HANA transformation, application management and change management work.

In February 2020 SAP said it would provide mainstream maintenance for the core applications of SAP Business Suite 7 until the end of 2027, with optional extended maintenance to the end of 2030. Companies still on that software face a move to S/4HANA. Daniel Schlecht, managing director and senior partner at BCG, described the hardest part of such a migration as “understanding what tens of thousands of custom objects actually do”. Haas wrote in October 2025 that chief executives had told him 3–4% of revenue goes on system maintenance.

Customers measured on SAP work

The Series A announcement names five early customers: Daimler Truck, Heidelberg Materials, Fraport, Rittal and DHL. It credits them with “design cycles 10x faster, and 50 to 80% cost savings in key migration phases”. Those numbers match the results BCG and Conduct reported in May from a pilot focused on fit-to-standard analysis, in which teams produced initial process designs up to 10 times faster. In its SAP announcement, Conduct said customers were seeing an acceleration of 30% or more in transformation workstreams. All of these figures are the company’s own.

The customers’ own words are more measured. “Conduct AI has contributed to accelerating our analytical tasks and processes within our digital department,” said Srinivas Gummadi, director of business system engineering at Heidelberg Materials. Sascha Tekok, senior vice-president of finance systems transformation at DHL, spoke in the future tense, saying Conduct “will fundamentally change how our teams work”.

Beyond SAP, from a New York base

The founders say the money will go on expanding the engineering and go-to-market teams, taking Conduct “beyond SAP across the entire enterprise stack” and building a second headquarters in New York. Conduct had a team of 30 in May, according to its SAP announcement, and Tech.eu put the London headcount at about 35 at the time of the round. In his mission post of October 2025, Haas named Oracle, Salesforce and Blue Yonder as systems with the same problem: decades of code that have become black boxes.

The founders put SAP’s reach at 87% of global commerce, a figure their post gives without a source. With SAP on its shareholder register and NTT DATA Business Solutions building the product into its delivery, Conduct now sits inside the SAP migration market ahead of the 2027 deadline. Every customer result it has published comes from that market; none yet comes from an Oracle or Salesforce estate, two of the systems Haas named in 2025 as having the same problem.