London-based Conduct, an enterprise AI startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, emerges from stealth with a $12M (approximately €10.1M) seed investment led by Creandum, alongside Lucid Capital, Booom, and angels from Palantir, Google DeepMind, Workday, and SAP.
The UK company’s vision is to remove the structural barriers within enterprise IT operations that for decades have stifled innovation and revenue growth.
“Enterprises need a way to continuously understand, improve, and future-proof their core systems. 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. We are thrilled to back a team with deep enterprise DNA and a relentless focus on customer value from day 1,” explains Peter Specht, General Partner at Creandum, who led the investment into Conduct.
Conduct: Eliminating structural barriers within enterprise IT operations
Conduct was founded by three former Palantir employees who saw how outdated ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems burden large companies, slowing growth and wasting resources.
The trio — Jan Philipp Haas, Philipp Hoefer, and Henry Thompson– believed that improving innovation and efficiency in enterprise technology can create significant economic value.
The company aims to upgrade old ERP systems with AI-powered tools that help IT teams work more clearly and efficiently.
Founded in 2024, the UK company is using agentic AI to solve a simple problem — organisations struggle to understand their very own systems and, as a result, fall behind on agility, innovation, and digital transformation.
The company’s agentic AI platform allows organisations to communicate directly with their ERP systems.
This gives IT leaders and business stakeholders direct control and clear insights into how complex codebases work and what business logic they contain.
With Conduct, organisations can achieve a level of clarity that many have struggled to reach in the past, claims the company.
Companies like Daimler Truck and Rittal, a top manufacturer of server racks, already use Conduct in their daily operations.
Henry Thompson, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, says, “The agentic AI that underpins Conduct has been designed so that as teams use Conduct, our platform gains more context about their business, giving back better and better answers. Conduct has been architected specifically to prevent your sensitive business data from leaking or being used to improve AI models for anyone outside your organisation, so teams can be confident in using the platform.”
SAP has set a 2027 deadline for businesses to migrate their ERP systems to the new S/4 HANA environment. This puts CIOs under pressure to make important decisions about their software. Companies risk spending millions on external consultants for lengthy migration projects that often fail or cause production downtime. As a result, many are looking for more reliable and accurate options to maintain their systems.
A key sticking point in many businesses’ migration is their SAP customisations.
Philipp Hoefer, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, explains: “Conduct helps customers evaluate which customisations contain critical functionality that needs to be maintained in the S/4HANA world, and which customisations can be replaced by standard SAP processes. . 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.”
