Conduct Raises $60M to Fix SAP Before 2027 Deadline

Conduct Secures $60 Million Series A to Decode Enterprise SAP Systems Ahead of the 2027 Deadline

There is a quiet but growing crisis unfolding inside the server rooms of the world's largest corporations. Decades of operational decisions — pricing logic buried in procurement modules, approval workflows coded into manufacturing pipelines, compliance rules embedded deep within financial systems — have slowly calcified into something that even the most experienced enterprise architects can no longer fully read, let alone change. These are not bugs. They are features, accumulated over years of customisation, that have made mission-critical software architecturally invisible to the very businesses that depend on it every single day. And with a hard deadline from SAP approaching at the end of 2027, the cost of that invisibility is about to become impossible to ignore.

It is precisely into this gap that London-based artificial intelligence startup Conduct has stepped, and investors are now betting heavily that the company has found the right answer at the right time. Conduct announced this week that it has raised $60 million in a Series A funding round co-led by ICONIQ Growth and Index Ventures, with SAP itself entering the round as a strategic investor. The round also saw participation from existing backers Creandum, Lucid Capital, and Booom, bringing Conduct's total funding to approximately $72 million following its $12 million seed round in September 2025. For a company that is just over a year old and operates with a team of only 35 people, the scale and profile of this fundraise represents one of the more remarkable early-stage votes of confidence seen in the enterprise AI space this year.

What Conduct Actually Does — And Why It Is Harder Than It Looks

To understand why investors moved this quickly and this decisively, it helps to understand the actual problem Conduct is solving, because on the surface it sounds deceptively simple. Large enterprises run complex software systems. People cannot understand those systems. Conduct helps them understand. But the real depth of the challenge only becomes clear when you consider what decades of ERP customisation actually looks like in practice.

A company that has been running SAP since the early 2000s has almost certainly layered thousands of custom developments, workarounds, field modifications, and integrations on top of the base system. Over time, the individuals who built those customisations retire or leave. Documentation becomes outdated or disappears altogether. What remains is a mass of interdependent logic that no single person or team holds in their head — a system that runs the business but cannot be fully explained by it. When that company needs to migrate to a new platform, upgrade a module, or introduce AI-driven automation, the first and most expensive step is simply figuring out what is already there. That discovery process alone — usually handed to large consulting firms — can take months and cost millions before a single line of productive work is done.

Conduct was founded in 2024 by Jan Philipp Haas, Philipp Hoefer, and Henry Thompson, all of whom spent years leading commercial and product functions at Palantir across major enterprise clients in Europe and Japan. That background is not incidental to what Conduct has built. Palantir's core product thesis is built around making complex, messy institutional data legible and actionable — the same logic Conduct applies to enterprise code. The platform works by analysing custom code, configuration settings, system dependencies, and external integrations within SAP environments, then mapping each technical element back to a specific business function. The result is that teams can actually ask the system meaningful operational questions — what downstream processes does this field modification affect, where exactly is this pricing rule applied, which workflows will this proposed migration touch — and receive answers grounded in the actual architecture of the system rather than someone's best recollection of a project from 2011.

Critically, Conduct does not stop at documentation or analysis. The platform goes on to generate the code, test scripts, and migration steps needed to execute changes safely. This distinguishes it from other enterprise architecture tools that produce maps and diagrams but leave the implementation work entirely to human teams. Current customers including Daimler Truck, Heidelberg Materials, airport operator Fraport, and DHL are already reporting that their transformation programmes are moving at least thirty percent faster with Conduct involved.

The SAP 2027 Deadline Is Creating Enormous Urgency in the Market

The investment thesis behind this round cannot be separated from a very specific, very concrete deadline that is now less than eighteen months away. SAP will end mainstream support for its ECC platform — the older version of its flagship ERP software — on December 31, 2027. After that date, companies still running ECC will not receive regular security patches, compliance updates, or functional improvements from SAP. The vendor has been clear that there will be no extension to this timeline, having already pushed it back once before.

The scale of the problem is staggering. According to research from Gartner, approximately 17,000 of SAP's 35,000 ECC customers around the world have not yet completed their migration to S/4HANA, SAP's current-generation platform. And migration timelines are not short — a typical full migration programme takes between 18 and 36 months to complete, depending on the complexity of the environment. That means that any company which has not already started its migration journey is now, at best, in a race against the clock. Many of these organisations are the world's largest industrial, manufacturing, logistics, and financial services companies — businesses where operational continuity is not optional and where a botched ERP migration can have consequences that ripple across entire supply chains.

This is the population that Conduct is specifically targeting. And the involvement of SAP itself as a strategic investor in this round is not merely symbolic. SAP has formally designated Conduct as a strategic AI partner for its Cloud ERP applications — a designation that is rare for an external startup of this size to receive and that signals genuine alignment between the two companies' go-to-market interests. SAP wants its customers to migrate successfully. Conduct helps them do that faster and with less risk. The partnership dynamic makes commercial sense in a way that goes well beyond a typical corporate venture bet.

Conduct has also announced partnerships with Boston Consulting Group and NTT DATA Business Solutions, two of the largest SAP transformation practices in the world. These are organisations that routinely run multi-year, multi-hundred-million-dollar ERP programmes for global enterprises. Embedding Conduct's platform into those engagements means direct access to exactly the kinds of customers that face the most complex migrations and have the least time to waste.

Why ICONIQ's Involvement at the Series A Stage Is Significant

For anyone who follows enterprise technology investing closely, one of the more eyebrow-raising elements of this round is the identity of the lead investor. ICONIQ Growth is not a firm that typically writes Series A cheques for 35-person startups based in London. The firm manages a portfolio of well over $100 billion in assets and is known for leading growth-stage rounds in companies that have already demonstrated significant commercial traction — businesses like Snowflake, Databricks, Anthropic, Figma, and ElevenLabs. Participating at the Series A, at this stage of Conduct's development, represents a genuine departure from the firm's usual pattern.

Seth Pierrepont, a general partner at ICONIQ, offered some insight into the reasoning. He described Conduct as building something that functions not just as a productivity tool but as foundational infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption more broadly. The argument runs something like this: AI agents and automation systems are increasingly capable of taking over complex enterprise workflows, but they can only operate on systems they can actually understand. The opacity of legacy ERP environments — all that accumulated customisation and undocumented logic — is one of the single biggest blockers to deploying AI effectively inside large companies. Conduct removes that blocker by making the system legible. That makes it not merely useful for the SAP migration wave, but structurally important to every enterprise AI initiative that comes after.

This framing was echoed by Sahir Azam, a partner at Index Ventures and former chief product officer at MongoDB, who described Conduct as targeting one of the largest and least visible pools of work currently being done by human teams inside large enterprises — the ongoing manual labour required to manage, maintain, and evolve complex enterprise IT systems. The comparison he drew to the automation wave already underway in customer support, software development, and back-office operations helps to position Conduct not as a migration specialist but as a platform for AI-driven enterprise operations more broadly.

Jan Philipp Haas, Conduct's chief executive, made a similar point in his own comments around the raise. He noted that most large organisations are currently being asked to demonstrate AI results, and that the honest answer in many cases is that their core systems are simply too opaque for AI to work on effectively. Decades of customisation have created environments that humans struggle to comprehend in full, and that AI agents cannot operate in at all without a foundation layer that makes the logic visible and executable. That is the foundation Conduct is building.

A Growing Market and a Competitive Landscape Worth Watching

The broader market that Conduct is operating in is both large and expanding rapidly. The global enterprise resource planning software market was valued at approximately $77 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $157 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of around 9.5 percent. The specific segment around ERP modernisation and migration is a smaller but equally dynamic subset of that market, and it is one that has attracted significant attention from both established software companies and venture-backed startups.

LeanIX, which SAP acquired in 2023, focuses on enterprise architecture visibility and gives organisations a way to understand their technology landscape at a portfolio level. Celonis, which achieved a valuation of $13.2 billion in its 2022 Series D, has built a powerful business around process mining — analysing event logs to understand how business processes actually execute in practice, as opposed to how they were designed. ServiceNow's IT operations management suite provides monitoring and management capabilities but does not generate change-ready code from within ERP customisation logic.

Conduct's differentiation sits in the move from understanding to action. Where other tools generate maps, reports, and visualisations, Conduct produces the code and tests required to actually execute changes. The company's co-founders describe this as the difference between a diagnostic and a treatment — both are necessary, but only one moves the work forward. The new funding will be deployed to grow Conduct's engineering and sales capabilities, deepen its SAP-specific functionality, and extend the platform to cover additional enterprise systems including Salesforce, Oracle, and manufacturing execution systems.

The SAP migration window is finite. The question of whether Conduct can establish itself as indispensable infrastructure before that window closes — and then successfully pivot its core capability to the next generation of enterprise modernisation challenges — will define the company's long-term trajectory. The investors who have backed it clearly believe the answer is yes, and the early commercial traction with some of the world's most demanding industrial enterprises gives that belief a concrete foundation.

For the thousands of companies still running SAP ECC with the December 2027 deadline bearing down on them, Conduct's timing could hardly be more relevant. The clock is running.