There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises.
Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. The round takes its total funding to around $72mn.
The company builds what it calls an “AI operating system for enterprise software”. In plain terms, it reads the millions of lines of custom code inside a big company’s core systems and maps each piece back to the business function it controls.
The 2027 clock #
The timing is not an accident. SAP ends mainstream support for its widely used ECC software on 31 December 2027, and roughly 17,000 of its 35,000 ECC customers have not yet moved off it, according to Gartner.
Those migrations take 18 to 36 months, which means a lot of very large companies are about to run out of road. That panic is the market Conduct is selling into.
The twist is who is backing it. SAP, whose deadline created the problem, has named Conduct a strategic partner to help its own customers escape its legacy systems.
Why investors care beyond the deadline #
The bigger pitch is about AI agents. Conduct’s argument is that agents cannot act on a system no human fully understands, and decades of customisation have made these systems opaque even to the people running them.
Make that code legible, the thinking goes, and you unlock the single largest pool of invisible enterprise work for automation. That thesis was enough to pull ICONIQ, a backer of Snowflake and Databricks that rarely does early-stage deals, into a London Series A.
The catch #
Conduct says customers including Daimler Truck, Fraport and DHL are running transformation projects far faster, and claims cost savings of 50 to 80 per cent in key phases. Those are the company’s own figures, not independently verified.
It is also not alone: SAP-owned LeanIX, the $13bn process-mining firm Celonis and ServiceNow all touch this space. And the SAP migration rush is finite. The real test is whether Conduct can become permanent infrastructure, and work beyond SAP, before the deadline that built it passes.
Get the TNW newsletter #
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.