JP Haas, Co-Founder & CEO at Conduct: BREAKING: Conduct just raised $60m in a Series A

0:00Hello and welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Jolson. Today we have got a repeat guest, JP, co-founder and CEO of Conduct. One of the first interviewees I had on the show probably nine months ago to announce their round back then. Now he's back with a bigger round. Take it away. What are you announcing today, JP?

0:17JP Haas:Good to see you again, Seb. Big honor to have been one of the first guests and one of the first repeat guests as well. Today, we're announcing our$60 million Series A co-led by Index and Iconic with SAP joining as a strategic investor. So basically everything and more than that we could have ever hoped for. A huge round,$60 million. And your last round was like nine months ago. So where did it come from? Where did this round appear from, given that you raised fairly recently and you probably didn't need it? We definitely didn't need it. We have a lot of money coming into the business even without the funding.

0:55JP Haas:Look, we don't really know where it came from. It was completely preemptive. We just caught up with all of the investors that we're close with anyway. We constantly catch up with the top funds in the world. And then when they heard about the momentum that we had on the commercial side, but also and in particular on the partnership side, We just recently had closed a global partnership with BCG, who are now pulling us into all of their big SAP accounts. I think the excitement was unbearable for them. And then they insisted on sending us term sheets. Fun fact, we actually got the first term sheet the day before the first IC was meant to happen.

1:36JP Haas:So that was a nice surprise on the Sunday. And then we kept getting more and more. And then SAP also joined. Amazing. So yes, Iconic and Index. given the excitement and the demand why those two funds so as i said we we had the the big privilege of being able to choose from the best funds in the world and then we we really doubled down on who are not just the funds and both of them you know index and iconic are great in their own ways but also really the individuals and we that was always very important to us as a company and as a founding team to work with people that we know we want to have with us on the journey and that are going to be with us in creating a massively successful generational company globally.

2:20JP Haas:And with, you know, Sahir at Index, who has scaled and been an operator at MongoDB himself, and with Seth, who's now on the board of some of the most successful AI companies in Europe, we thought that was such a baller combination and we can't wait to scale the company with them. Amazing. And I want to talk about the SAP investment as well and them coming on board. But before we talk about why that's particularly important, can you kind of give a recap for what exactly you've built and what Conduct does, just for people who maybe don't know? Yes, for sure. And we'd love to hear what people also say after the first episode and how it's evolved.

2:57JP Haas:But let me quickly remind everyone of the problem we're solving. So look around you and all the companies that are building the products that are forming everyday life around us, from car companies like your BMWs to the Coca-Cola's of the world. They all have highly, highly complex operations from procurement to production to finance and accounting and warehouse management and logistics to also being, you know, global operations across multiple entities and different country units. The complexity of these operations are all defined in dozens of different enterprise systems that have been customized to these specific purposes of what Coca-Cola needs and what makes Coca-Cola so specific.

3:43JP Haas:The problem with that is whenever you need to make a change to how your company runs from a business perspective, they need to change something about their logistics operation or they need to change something about the technical setup. They need to migrate to the cloud. One old system gets deprecated and it's replaced by a new one. You really don't know how to best implement that and how it impacts your business. So that connection between the business side and the IT side is really missing. So Conduct is the connective tissue between business and IT and the platform on which they collaborate to evolve their systems faster with the ultimate purpose of making these very, very important companies move faster and innovate faster.

4:27JP Haas:Amazing. And so SAP have come on board. What's that like? You are working in SAP, I guess, very close to the software itself. To have them come on board, what does that mean for you? Let me start with a personal perspective on this, which is it's always great to see and makes you very proud and in a way humbled. Everyone says I'm humbled on LinkedIn, so I'm saying it now as well, but here we go. So it is a very cool thing to see that SAP as the most important enterprise software company in the world is saying what these guys are building is really, really relevant and so important for our customers that we're choosing them as one of our very few AI partners alongside Anthropic and N8N and all of these global heavyweights.

5:18JP Haas:and that they're now rolling us out to basically all of their accounts globally to accelerate how their customers can get value out of the SAP system, but in general just become more AI automated and AI powered enterprises. Yes, it's an amazing validation. You mentioned earlier on about some of the commercial attraction that you've seen and how important that was in getting some of these great investors on board. Can you touch a bit more about that, especially maybe on the go-to-market side? because you're now partnering with amazing organizations that are leading the way in SAP transformation.

5:53So it'd be interesting to hear a bit more about some of the successes you've seen, some of the customers you're working with, and how you're kind of able to access them.

6:01JP Haas:Yeah, so we're really successful on two go-to-market channels. Number one, the direct motion is totally working, right? We've got an independent sales channel. we get in via the CIO and the SAP and other enterprise system teams. And we're able to really quickly show them why what we're doing really matters. And the amazing thing to see for us is just how much of a wow moment and the feeling of liberation it is for them to see Conduct come live. I mean, we've recently onboarded one of the biggest logistics companies in the world. And they were up and running within 24 hours. And their teams, even before getting the first training from us, called us and said, this is amazing.

6:49JP Haas:We want to buy it. That's been unheard of and impossible in our former times at Palantir. And so you really have this kind of magic wow moment of something that used to take months and years is now possible on the spot. And the value you're getting is so, so enormous. And that's really magical to see for us. The second thing is the partner motion. I think the interesting thing here is partnerships, they don't work in general, right? The number one thing is you really need to invest into each of them as your own account. You need to nurture them. But more importantly, you need to really find the crux of what matters to these partners and can you become strategically relevant to them?

7:40JP Haas:And to our partners, we are such a critical building block in their strategy because the question in the market right now is, what is the future of what Accenture, EY, PwC, how are they going to be super relevant in the age of AI? And our answer to that is, well, you need to partner with tool providers like us in order to deliver faster for your customers and to basically automate the work that isn't core to what you're offering and instead focus on the much, much higher value aspects of it. The strategic elements of architectural trade-offs, of business transformation questions. And so if they do that, they're able to sell much higher margin projects at much higher velocity.

8:35JP Haas:And so everyone wins. Amazing. And, you know, I guess you've been, when we first started, when we first had the interview, you know, nine, 10 months ago, you were really focused on SAP. SAP was the software that you were kind of helping to kind of drive insights out of to help people connect to it. Now you're looking at other platforms. Is that right? Can you talk a bit about that journey and where you're going to be focused on? Yeah, for sure. So number one, and as a German, it makes me very proud to say SAP very much is the heart of the enterprise. And they've really deserved and earned that position.

9:10JP Haas:And so it was a natural starting point for us to start with them because it's everything at the center. And all the follow-on systems afterwards are going to be so much easier to crack. The second thing is, and here's where it aligns with our vision and why we're building conduct, the ultimate mission is to make enterprises be able to innovate and evolve faster and to serve their customers better by transforming their systems faster. But by definition, your business process doesn't end at the confines of SAP. It's very much this whole chain of different systems working together to form the business process, which is from a Salesforce instance, which then passes on the order to an SAP system, which passes it on to an MES system, which operates the shop floor, to a SCADA system that designs and operates the machines, and then to the logistics system.

10:11JP Haas:So you need to understand the end-to-end process in order to make the company as a whole move faster. And once you do that, you allow the business to actually think not in terms of technical objects or systems or code anymore. They only think about, I need a new plant to be connected and optimized, make it happen. That's what we're building. Amazing. And, you know, we've seen, I think we touched on this last time, but we've seen this sort of like SaaS stock sell off where like a lot of people are saying AI is going to disrupt and make a lot of the old enterprise softwares redundant. What's your view on that?

10:50JP Haas:I think it's BS to say it very politely, which, you know, I think it's been an absolute overreaction. I think it's been pushed by people who haven't really worked in the enterprise reality. if you think about the fact that it takes years if not 10 years plus to run a migration from an on-premise to cloud system then imagine what it looks like for an enterprise fortune 50 for someone on the board there to sign off on let's move all our operations to this wide-coded erp system that's just not going to happen and so there is going to be a lot of ai innovation in the enterprise stack for sure and that's why we're building conduct you know and we can talk about what that looks like in the stack but the the core enterprise system layer is not going to be disrupted yeah i completely agree i think people who think that don't realize how deeply embedded these systems are right it's not like a consumer bit of software that you can just like subscribe and unsubscribe to this is like the full architecture of a business um which Yeah, which I think is so embedded that it's not something you can just disrupt and replace easily.

12:03What's it been like working with these companies, right, who are often very large, very traditional, more like old school companies than, you know, lots of tech companies are selling to other tech companies. You are targeting like some of the biggest, most established brands in the world. What's it like working with these companies to try and bring new innovative technology to their stack?

12:24JP Haas:Look, honestly, it's been amazing. I think many of our customers get a very bad rep for being perceived as slow, and especially IT departments at the heart of it are perceived to be slowing down innovation. And that's so unfair because they're just doing an impossible job. Imagine how hard it is to coordinate what thousands of business users are asking for across your hundreds of different company units, and then having to translate that into the hundreds of different systems and millions of lines of code on the other side, that's just impossible to do. And so enabling them to go towards that vision and being able to make that transition faster has been an amazing process for them.

13:10JP Haas:I think they also really buy into the vision of what we're building together. They all really believe that the future of an agentic enterprise is going to be this interaction between agents operating with and on top of their legacy enterprise systems and they need access to all of the context of what's happening inside of these systems as well as in the big buzzword, the tacit knowledge of what happens in the enterprise and what people have in their heads around how they take decisions on a day-to-day. And so conduct is over time becoming more and more that platform of we're starting with what happens in the enterprise systems, what are all the deterministic processes there.

13:52JP Haas:But by operating these layers, we also generate and collect all of that context as well, which we can then feed back to the agents to enable the agentic enterprise future. And since we last spoke, you've obviously been on this amazing journey. Things are going well. What hasn't gone so well? What have you had to change or adjust? Or what have you learned that you didn't expect? Yeah, so it's a really good question because there's so many learnings all the time and we all make mistakes all the time. I think what stands out is you really have to adjust and iterate how you're building your organization in line with your specific product, go-to-market and customers.

14:38JP Haas:So when we set out to build the business development organization at Conduct, I think we didn't really have a good idea of what it was going to look like, what are the different roles on there. And so we had to refine that over time to really nail the sales cycle and to support our customers in the best possible way. Interesting. Okay. And let's touch on geographic footprint. You are German yourself. You're building in London. Your team's in London. You're selling a lot to mainland Europe. You're looking at the US. What does it look like at the moment? Where are your customers coming from? Where do you think they're going to come from in the future?

15:15JP Haas:Yeah. We've always been a European company with a global ambition, right? And we're already seeing that in our customer base. We've got customers in APAC. We've got customers in the US now. We've got customers in France, which many people say moves even more slowly than Germany. But we're seeing great velocity there as well. And so we're really global there already. And now we're expanding with a second HQ to New York as well. We've just made the first hires there. And so we expect us to be a fully cross-Atlantic company this year already. And what does that model look like? Are you doing like a full deployed engineer model?

15:55Is that sort of like a US outpost? What's the structure?

15:59JP Haas:We treat it as a second HQ, which means if you're a full setup of the founders are going to split their time between New York and London, We're going to have an engineering team there. We're going to have, you know, corporations there just to support our customers in the best possible way. I mean, SAP is pushing us into their biggest accounts in the U.S. right now. So we need to be there. We need to support them in the best possible way. That's amazing. How much additional, like how impactful is having that SAP strategic relationship? Like are they introducing you to dozens of more customers? What is that unlocked for you?

16:35JP Haas:It's unlocked so much. It's been a complete game changer. It's even more transformative than the BCG and MT2 data partnerships. So imagine, I mean, SAP has many strengths, but one of them is their global distribution. I mean, they are in the accounts and cover them super closely with any big enterprise in the world. And so before pushing us into that and before giving their stamp of approval, they ran a very, very sophisticated process with us against all of our competitors out there with a technical deep dive. So we were literally vetted against on all the dimensions. And fun fact for you, on some of these dimensions, we knew our competition was actually very strong because they had been set up more in these areas from the beginning.

17:22JP Haas:And we thought that, and we had been convinced and still are that other areas are actually more important. But then we literally had the whole engineering team do all-nighters for a week. and then we beat our competition at literally every dimension, even the ones that they've been doubling down on for more than a year. And so they then chose us as their preferred partner for the whole AI transformation space. And now we are on track to become what's called an endorsed app. It basically means a co-selling partnership where SAP Salesforce gets credits for any conduct revenue that they bring to customers.

18:02JP Haas:So they're completely incentivized and equally incentivized to sell Conduct just as they are to sell SAP, which is obviously a massive accelerant for us. And we're going to be at multiples of the revenue and the size by even a few months. That's crazy. I wouldn't have ever expected SAP to be the most value-add investor in Europe. That's what it sounds like. And they're doing it, you know, and they're telling me they're investing in Pollo. That's crazy that this is going to be so transformative for the business. is there anything that you can share about your ambitions you know where do you want to be end of year kid you know how quickly do you think you can get to certain revenue milestones what's the ambition look the ambition is to be a truly global company to be fully dominant in our space and to do that across all the other geographies um we're going to be we're going to be a multiple of the revenue that we we are doing today we're going to be with you know dozens of enterprise customers by then.

18:59JP Haas:We're going to be covering the vast majority of the big SI players out there. And it's going to be very clear to our customers why they should be partnering with us. Amazing. One final question. You're obviously, you've raised a huge sum of money. You're massively growing the team. What are some of the roles that you're most excited about hiring? What should people be looking at? Look, I'm going to start generic first, which is we're looking for people that are incredibly curious, intrinsically motivated, and that are a culture fit in our kindness and the fun that we're having in building this company every day.

19:33JP Haas:Those are the most important elements. We put so much emphasis on that and we think so much follows from these values. In terms of roles, we're hiring across the board and we're doing so aggressively. I mean, start from engineering. We're hiring the best possible engineers in the world, again, across London and New York. We're hiring AEs who have done complex enterprise sales cycles before. We're hiring deployment strategists who basically make our customers successful with the Conrad platform and grow our accounts over time and discover new features that they can then build back into the product.

20:13JP Haas:We have a very tight integration loop between our product engineers and our deployments. and we're also hiring across all of the different functions around HR and marketing and growth. So if you're excited about building a generational company from London, apply. Amazing. By the way, we are paying a 20K referral bonus just in case that makes any difference. Amazing. Look, I think you guys are absolutely crushing it and I can't wait to have you back on for the Series B, but like would highly recommend get your applications in, join JP and the team. It's an amazing company. Well, look, JP, thank you so much for joining me congratulations can't wait to see you just go from strength to strength thank you seb always good to be on