London’s Conduct has quietly emerged from stealth with a $12 million seed round led by Creandum, joined by Lucid Capital, Booom, and angel investors from Palantir, Google DeepMind, and SAP.
Founded last year by former Palantir engineers Jan Philipp Haas (CEO), Philipp Hoefer (Chief Product Officer), and Henry Thompson (CTO), Conduct is on a mission to modernise the sprawling legacy ERP systems that support the world’s biggest companies, with an early focus on SAP.
Legacy ERP platforms underpinning most Fortune 500 companies often span millions of lines of complex customisation, creating immense operational headaches and a costly burden for IT teams trapped in maintenance mode.
Conduct aims to flip the script. Its AI-powered platform allows enterprises to engage directly with their ERP environments, peeling back layers of hidden business logic and operational code that have long been a black box.
Early pilots with global heavyweights, including Daimler Truck and Rittal, have shown the platform can slash operational costs by up to 90% and speed up issue resolution.
Contextual AI tailored for SAP migrations
Haas puts it bluntly: “We believe that IT should be the core growth engine of every enterprise, but today CEOs repeatedly tell us that IT is becoming a blocker to business outcomes: 3-4% of enterprise revenue is spent on system maintenance. Conduct’s AI agents drastically reduce the resource burden of software maintenance, allowing IT teams to focus on system innovation that drives revenue and productivity gains.”
A key differentiator for Conduct is its agentic AI, which learns the unique context of each customer’s ERP system over time, refining insights with every interaction, while safeguarding highly sensitive business data. This capability comes at a critical time: enterprises face a hard 2027 deadline to migrate legacy SAP ERP to the S/4HANA platform. These migrations are notoriously complicated and costly, often dragged out by painstaking custom code reviews.
Hoefer explains, “For $1 spent on SAP customisation, $2 on average has to be spent on ongoing maintenance costs, so we built Conduct to drastically reduce the burden of managing your custom code, helping you keep your competitive edge while making your systems leaner and easier to maintain.”
Competing in a crowded field with deep enterprise roots
Entering a crowded market of AI-driven ERP optimisers, including Wayflyer, LeanIX, and Celonis, Conduct sets itself apart through its deep enterprise roots and focus on privacy-first, context-aware AI solutions.
Creandum’s General Partner Peter Specht adds: “Conduct’s AI platform does exactly that. Starting with the SAP S/4HANA migration, the single most critical transformation in enterprise IT, Conduct is uniquely positioned to redefine how global leaders manage their most complex systems.”
After quietly growing for 18 months, Conduct now has a team of 16 and is hiring aggressively. With IT maintenance costs ballooning and migration deadlines looming, the founders see an opportunity to transform how enterprises think about their core systems, from cost centres into strategic growth engines powered by AI.
