Conduct: a world where corporates move at startup speed

Almost every major enterprise runs on decades of hard-won knowledge baked into its operations – how a plant runs, how the supply chain connects, or how products get priced. These unique processes aren’t mere technical debt or the relics of legacy systems. They are the business, its IP, the very thing that gives a company its competitive edge.

This IP lives in a handful of core systems, such as SAP, Oracle and Salesforce – each of which has been customized over generations to fit one company’s exact way of working. The tighter the fit, the sharper the edge. Two carmakers each run their plants differently, and their systems are customized to encode how each one works; those differences are why their cars feel nothing like each other’s. Put both on the same off-the-shelf software and you’d have to smooth away what sets them apart.

But this gives rise to a paradox: the very thing that gives multinationals an advantage is also what’s holding them back. For every dollar a large company spends on its core systems, it spends roughly two more on the people who personalize and maintain it. And after all that, change is slow and costly, routinely running to the millions if not billions of dollars, and gated at every step by IT.

This is the problem that Conduct – founded in London by three former leaders at Palantir – has set out to fix. JP, Philipp and Henry used to work deep in the innards of major multinationals, which held their clients' accumulated intelligence: how a procurement process works, or why a particular approval rule exists. The average SAP system, for example, contains more than 12,000 custom objects. But the overall logic is opaque. But the overall logic remains opaque. No human can grasp the rationale and operation behind the whole thing; no one is even capable of knowing it, given its scale and complexity. IT teams can read the code but don’t hold the business context; business teams know the processes but can’t translate them into system changes.

Conduct closes this gap by collapsing all the manual work onto software. First, it ingests all the custom code and data models across a company’s systems and makes visible how and why everything is set up the way it is – every customization, across hundreds of modules and dependencies. What was scattered and unreadable becomes a single model anyone can see and question. IT teams go from guessing to knowing, and become 10x more effective partners to the business.

Secondly, anyone can prompt Conduct in plain language to modify the business as its needs evolve. This empowers all stakeholders, so that the gap between business and IT closes; the people who feel the need can make the change to the underlying systems, with IT as a partner in rolling it out. Conduct writes the code, generates and runs the tests, and deploys the customization. That empowers CIOs and engineers to push changes into production with every dependency already mapped, so nothing downstream breaks. The seeing and the doing fit together as one (after all, a map you can’t act on is just another dashboard).

The impact is that, almost overnight, corporations can change and adapt much faster. As Conduct removes the manual and laborious tasks involved in building and maintaining enterprise IT, suddenly a pricing change can ship in days instead of months, and a new manufacturing process goes live in days, not quarters. And the economy around these businesses can speed up too. The giants that created large parts of the modern world, now routinely outrun by younger software-native rivals, will get to move at something close to startup speed, while keeping the rigor their scale demands.

Alongside this opportunity, a major reason we're backing Conduct is the extraordinary and complementary team. What stood out to us was how deliberately this team is building their culture and working relationship as founders. They are treating the way they communicate and operate together as something to be designed and strengthened intentionally, not left to chance – a level of intentionality we rarely see this early.

Conduct is already serving mainstream large enterprises including DHL, Heidelberg Materials and Daimler, and has partnerships with SAP, BCG and NTT. But beyond its immediate impact, the company is also laying the groundwork for a future of agentic commerce. As AI agents take on more work inside and on behalf of businesses, they’ll need the context Conduct provides; an agent asked to close the books or run a procurement, for example, is useless unless it knows how this particular company actually does those things. The readable and editable corporate genome that Conduct is building is the precondition for that world.

For now, though, it’s more than enough that Conduct continue empowering the largest global companies to read and rewire themselves from within. We’re thrilled to be co-leading their $60 million Series A along with ICONIQ, and can’t wait to see what evolves as a result.