Scaling Europe
00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, and welcome back to Scaling Europe Show. I'm Seb Johnson. 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? [00:00:17] S1: 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 $60,000,000 series a co led by Index and Iconiq with SAP joining as a strategic investor. So basically everything and more than that we could have ever hoped for. [00:00:36] S0: A huge round. 60,000,000. And your last round was, like, nine months ago. So where where did they come from? Like, 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
00:00:36 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:00:36] S0: A huge round. 60,000,000. And your last round was, like, nine months ago. So where where did they come from? Like, 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 [00:00:50] S1: of money coming into the business even without even without the funding. Look, we don't really know where it came from. It was completely preemptive. We just caught up with all of our, you know, 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. So that was a nice surprise on the Sunday and then we kept getting more and more, and then SAP also joined. [00:01:43] S0: Amazing. And so, yes, Iconiq and Index. Given the excitement and the demand, why those two funds?
00:01:43 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:01:43] S0: Amazing. And so, yes, Iconiq and Index. Given the excitement and the demand, why those two funds? [00:01:51] S1: So as I said, we had 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 Iconiq 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 gonna be with us in creating a massively successful generational company globally. 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 some of the most successful AI companies in Europe, we thought that was that was such a baller combination, and we can't we can't wait to scale the company with them. [00:02:39] S0: Amazing. And, like, I wanna talk about the SAP investment as well and them coming on board. But before we talk about why that 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 who maybe don't know?
00:02:52 · JP Haas
[00:02:52] S1: Yes, for sure. And we'd love to hear what people also say after the first episode and how it's evolved. 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 Colas 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. 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, you know, old system gets deprecated and that's... Is 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.
00:04:27 · Sebastian Johnson, JP Haas
[00:04:27] S0: Amazing. And so SAP have come on board. How... What's that like? You know, you're... You are working in SAP, I guess, very close to the software itself. To have them come on board, what does that what does that mean for you? [00:04:41] S1: Well, let me start with a personal perspective on this, which is it's always great to see and very 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. 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. 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 their 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
00:04:41 · JP Haas, Sebastian Johnson
[00:04:41] S1: Well, let me start with a personal perspective on this, which is it's always great to see and very 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. 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. 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 their 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 [00:05:38] S0: of the commercial traction that you've seen and 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 know, you're now partnering with amazing organizations that are leading the way in SAP transformation. So it'd be interesting to hear a bit more about of the successes you've seen, some of the customers you're working with, and how you're kind of able to access them.