Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
UK Startups and Innovation
22JUL

Conduct takes $60m as SAP buys in

4 min read
09:12UTC

Conduct, founded by three ex-Palantir engineers, raised a $60m Series A on 17 June co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP investing strategically and embedding the product in its own software.

TechnologyAssessed
Key takeaway

SAP bought a stake in the tool that fixes the migration deadline it created.

Conduct raised a $60m Series A on Wednesday 17 June, co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with the German software giant SAP investing strategically and embedding Conduct inside its own products 1. The London company was founded in 2024 by three former Palantir engineers, including chief executive JP Haas, and went from an $11m seed to this round in under a year. It runs 38 staff in London, counts DHL and Fraport among its customers, and plans a New York office 2.

The reason SAP wrote a cheque sits in a deadline of its own making. SAP ends mainstream support for its ECC (ERP Central Component) software on 31 December 2027, and on one industry count roughly 17,000 of 35,000 ECC customers, almost half, have not yet moved to its successor. That stranded base, large companies running ageing core software against a hard cliff, is exactly the market Conduct's agentic AI is built to serve. An external tool that automates the migration is worth more to SAP owned than competing, which is the structural logic behind a strategic cheque rather than an arm's-length one.

Conduct adds to a London run of founders raising on foreign strategic money, after Geordie's $30m for AI-agent security led by Balderton and Airspeed's £14.9m from a team of ex-DeepMind scientists . The throughline is a city producing enterprise-AI companies whose lead capital and, increasingly, whose strategic backers arrive from outside Britain.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

SAP is a German software company whose products sit at the core of how many large organisations run their operations ; tracking inventory, managing payroll, processing orders. Many of the largest companies in the world still run a version of SAP called ECC, which is being switched off at the end of 2027. Roughly half of those companies have not yet started the process of moving to the newer version. Conduct is a London startup founded in 2024 by three engineers who previously worked at Palantir, an American company that specialises in making sense of complex, messy data. Conduct has built AI software that can read a company's existing SAP setup and help automate the migration to the new system. On 17 June 2026 it announced a $60m investment round, with SAP itself investing and embedding Conduct's software inside its own products. SAP investing in a startup that helps customers migrate faster is a bit like a moving company investing in a firm that makes boxes ; it benefits directly if the process gets easier and more customers start the process before the 2027 deadline.

Deep Analysis
Root Causes

SAP set the ECC support deadline as a commercial forcing function to drive its 35,000 ECC customers toward S/4HANA, the cloud-native successor. The deadline was extended once already, from 2025 to 2027, which paradoxically created a large pool of deferred migrators who now face a hard cliff with fewer years remaining. That pool ; roughly 17,000 companies, many of them large enterprises in logistics, manufacturing and chemicals ; represents the addressable market Conduct is selling into.

Palantir's core product is a data integration layer for complex, heterogeneous legacy environments, exactly the skillset needed to read and reconstruct bespoke SAP configurations. Palantir's core product is an enterprise data integration and workflow layer for complex, heterogeneous legacy environments ; exactly the skillset needed to read, translate and reconstruct bespoke SAP configurations. The three founders' domain expertise is not generic agentic AI; it is legacy enterprise data at scale.

What could happen next?
  • Consequence

    SAP embedding Conduct inside its own products accelerates sales cycles into the 17,000-strong un-migrated ECC customer base, giving Conduct distribution that most enterprise-AI startups spend years building.

    Short term · Assessed
  • Risk

    Conduct's core market closes on 31 December 2027. A product roadmap that does not extend into post-migration workflow automation or other enterprise AI verticals leaves the company exposed to a demand cliff matching the ECC deadline.

    Medium term · Assessed
  • Precedent

    SAP's strategic-investor position in Conduct ; embedding an external startup's product rather than building or acquiring ; marks a shift in how large enterprise software vendors respond to agentic AI: partnership and product integration over outright acquisition.

    Medium term · Reported
First Reported In

Update #9 · Private money rebuilds Britain's seed tier

Sifted· 24 Jun 2026
Read original
Different Perspectives
EQT
EQT
EQT was reported on 3 July to be in advanced talks for a further CuspAI stake on behalf of the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund, but does not appear on the round CuspAI closed. Whether Europe's own sovereign vehicle secured a position, was outbid, or withdrew is unresolved.
Invest-NL
Invest-NL
Invest-NL joined CuspAI's $450m round as a new state investor alongside Britain's Sovereign AI Unit, named in the company's own 20 July announcement. Any framing of British state capital arriving must also credit Dutch capital with the same access, since Invest-NL took the opportunity too.
Kleiner Perkins and Bezos Expeditions
Kleiner Perkins and Bezos Expeditions
Kleiner Perkins and Bezos Expeditions co-led CuspAI's $450m Series B at a $2.6bn valuation, a figure Lowdown has now reported three times since June. Silicon Valley and a family office, not a UK investor, set the price of Britain's highest-profile materials-AI company.
British Business Bank
British Business Bank
British Business Bank proposed a £100m debt fund for aerospace suppliers at Farnborough on 20 July, co-designed with Airbus, Rolls-Royce and GKN Aerospace. It is the Bank's first non-equity instrument this cycle, aimed at suppliers who can service a loan but have no equity story, though the structure remains unfinalised.
Institute of Physics
Institute of Physics
The Institute has long argued STFC's national-laboratory infrastructure, not its grant programmes, is the binding constraint on UK physics output, and warns mothballing capacity like Clara removes capability that cannot be rebuilt on a four-year cycle. It represents the discovery-science community absorbing the reallocation the Bank's equity cheques do not touch.
Helsing
Helsing
The Munich-headquartered defence-AI firm chose Plymouth over Continental sites for a £350m manufacturing plant building underwater surveillance gliders, alongside its record raise. Its choice of postcode signals confidence in UK manufacturing capacity for defence hardware even as it looks abroad for the capital financing that hardware.