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UK Startups and Innovation
24AUG

Conduct takes $60m as SAP buys in

4 min read
16:40UTC

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.

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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
Sources:Sifted·UKRI
Mentions:Index Ventures →SAP →Palantir →Salesforce →Gartner →London →Oracle →Forrester →Accenture →Geordie →Airspeed →Essex County Council →Conduct →
First Reported In

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

Sifted· 24 Jun 2026
Read original →
Causes and effects
Caused by
Balderton leads Geordie's $30m AI round
Geordie's $30m from Balderton for AI-agent security preceded Conduct's raise from the same London ex-frontier-lab cluster of enterprise-AI founders.
Occurred 28 May 2026
Read story →
Ex-DeepMind founders raise £14.9m for Airspeed
Airspeed's £14.9m from DN Capital adds to the London ex-DeepMind/ex-Palantir enterprise-AI cluster that Conduct's round also reflects.
Occurred 4 Jun 2026
Read story →
This Event
Conduct takes $60m as SAP buys in
SAP bought a stake in a tool that automates the migration its own 2027 support deadline forces on roughly half its customer base.
Led to
J&J backs Trimtech seed to GBP35.6m
SAP's strategic stake in Conduct set the template of a corporate investor buying board-seat visibility, now repeated with J&J Innovation and BGF in Trimtech.
Occurred 22 Jun 2026
Read story →
Humanoid's buyers wrote the $152m cheque
Conduct's SAP-backed round is the closest prior precedent for an industrial investor embedding inside a UK cap table.
Occurred 21 Jul 2026
Read story →
Different Perspectives
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Highland Europe
Highland Europe, the growth-equity firm behind a €1bn-plus fund, took €65m from the British Business Bank into its Technology Growth Fund VI on 30 July via British Patient Capital. For a Geneva-based growth investor, the Bank's cheque is routine cornerstone capital, unrelated to which Whitehall department currently claims to sponsor UKRI.
Integrity Growth Partners
Integrity Growth Partners
The Los Angeles firm put £16.1m into Prevalent AI on 24 August, the London GCHQ-alumni company's first outside capital, specifically to fund its US expansion. Its stake is a single commercial bet on one UK deep-tech founder's American growth, not a comment on which department UKRI answers to this month.
Temasek
Temasek
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Innovate UK's Women in Innovation cohort
Innovate UK's Women in Innovation cohort
Sixty-one founders won £75,000 grants from Innovate UK on 5 August, the programme's largest-ever cohort, with a further 39 highly commended founders taking support without cash. For these founders the sponsorship dispute over UKRI's parent department is academic: the money and mentoring arrived exactly as scheduled.
Financial Conduct Authority
Financial Conduct Authority
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Cabinet Office
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