Skip to content
You can now search across every topic, entity and event.What's new
UK Startups and Innovation
21SEP

Conduct takes $60m as SAP buys in

4 min read
16:52UTC

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.

← Back to Nscale takes $103.4bn of contracts to NYSEJump to analysis ↓
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 £35.6m
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
Nscale and Open Cosmos
Nscale and Open Cosmos
Nscale chose the New York Stock Exchange for its listing on 18 September, putting Britain's largest AI infrastructure bet to American public investors rather than British ones. Open Cosmos took the opposite route four days earlier, raising nine figures from an all-domestic syndicate on five years of profit, evidence that staying is possible when the balance sheet allows it.
Dame Chi Onwurah and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Dame Chi Onwurah and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Committee chair Dame Chi Onwurah wrote to government on 7 September asking how Matt Clifford's conflict at ARIA arose and what safeguards protect its governance, and expects a detailed response. Her question has not yet been put to the Sovereign AI Unit, whose own chair sits at a venture capital firm while overseeing state AI equity.
The Entrepreneurs Network
The Entrepreneurs Network
The Entrepreneurs Network's founder survey found 65% say Britain is easy to start a business in but only 14% say it is easy to scale one, with 82% negative on tax and 74% finding investment hard to access. On this reading the constraint is regulation and tax, not the capital-vehicle design the state keeps adjusting.
New Economics Foundation
New Economics Foundation
The New Economics Foundation argues fiscal accounting rules, not political will, cap what Britain's state capital vehicles can do. Matching the KfW and Bpifrance benchmark of 1% of GDP would need the National Wealth Fund to deploy roughly GBP21bn a year by 2028-29, about four times its current capacity.
Competition and Markets Authority
Competition and Markets Authority
The CMA's 8 September report on public procurement asked whether Britain's roughly GBP400bn state-spending system is built to grow high-potential firms rather than simply widen SME participation. Its Recommendation 5 calls for a dedicated frontier-technology procurement framework, an official acknowledgement that today's design may serve the wrong target.
Highland Europe
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.