AI operating system startup Conduct closes £45m round

Conduct, a startup that has developed an “AI operating system” for managing complex software systems, has secured a $60m (£44.72m) Series A funding round.

The idea behind Conduct is helping large enterprises continue to run on bloated systems that have had thousands of changes and customisations over the years.

Changing or update critical processes regarding workflows, approval chains or supply-chain dependencies can take going through millions of lines of custom code to make manual changes.

Conduct said that its system solves this with a platform that takes in custom code, configuration dependencies and integrations and maps how every technical component connects to the business logic it serves.

“Every major enterprise is being asked where its AI results are. The honest answer, in most organisations, is that the systems AI needs to work on today cannot be fully comprehended by humans,” said Jan Philipp Haas, co-founder and chief executive of Conduct.

“Decades of customisation have made them opaque, even to the people running them. The same opacity that slows people down stops agents entirely, because an agent can only act on a system it understands.

“Conduct makes those systems legible and operable. That is the foundation everything else depends on.”

The Series A investment was co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ with strategic investment from SAP, Creandum, Lucid Capital and Booom.

“Enterprise systems were built to be customised. That is why they are so powerful and also why they have become so difficult to operate,” said Sahir Azam, a partner at Index Ventures.

“We are now seeing agents take over work that used to require entire teams of people, whether that is writing code, handling customer support, or running back-office operations.

“Conduct is going after one of the largest and least visible pools of that work: the manual labour required to manage complex enterprise IT systems at the core of business.”