Conduct, an AI operating system startup, secured a $60 million Series A round, pushing its total financing near £45 million.
Funding round draws venture capital and strategic backers
The investment was co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ. Strategic participants included SAP, Creandum, Lucid Capital, and Booom. The capital will speed platform development and extend its reach within large enterprises.
How Conduct’s platform tackles legacy complexity
Many enterprises rely on software modified and patched for decades. These changes accumulate, resulting in systems with millions of lines of custom code. Modifying workflows, approval chains, or supply-chain dependencies often requires sifting through vast codebases.
Conduct’s platform ingests custom code, configurations, and integration points, then maps each element to its business function. This process makes underlying systems clearer and easier to operate, allowing automated agents to perform tasks where humans once struggled.
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Executive perspective on AI readiness
Jan Philipp Haas, Conduct’s co-founder and chief executive, stated that most organizations don’t fully grasp the systems their AI applications depend on. “Decades of customization have made them difficult to understand, even for those managing them,” he said. The platform’s ability to reveal hidden connections enables further AI-driven automation.
Haas noted that enterprises are frequently asked about their AI results. The truth, he explained, is that the systems AI must work with often remain incomprehensible to humans. This highlights a key industry challenge: the mismatch between AI capabilities and legacy IT complexity.
Venture capital view on the market opportunity
A partner at Index Ventures, Sahir Azam, pointed out that enterprise systems were designed for flexibility but became hard to manage. “Agents are now handling tasks that once required entire teams—writing code, customer support, or back-office operations,” he said.
Azam described the manual labor maintaining complex IT systems as a major, often overlooked, workload. Index Ventures’ backing signals confidence that Conduct can address this issue effectively.
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Industry context and potential impact
Large corporations often depend on a mix of in-house tools, third-party services, and custom integrations. These setups can obscure data flows and decision-making, increasing risk and inefficiency. Conduct’s platform aims to expose these hidden links, reducing the need for manual oversight.
As AI agents advance, the quality of data and clarity of processes become critical. By improving system transparency, Conduct could enhance AI reliability in finance, logistics, and customer service.
Next steps for the startup
The new funding will help Conduct expand its engineering team and strengthen partnerships with enterprise software providers. It also plans to pilot its technology with select large customers, though names remain undisclosed.
A senior manager at a prospective client called the idea of cutting endless legacy code revisions promising but emphasized that real-world testing would determine success.
