Qorelo Lands $3.5M Seed to Tackle SAP’s 2027 Migration Crunch

Berlin-based AI startup Qorelo has raised $3.5 million in seed funding five months after launch, with an AI product aimed at companies racing to leave SAP’s legacy software. The round, announced on 15 June, was co-led by HPI Ventures and Caesar Ventures, with participation from 10x Founders, Antler, Adesso Ventures, and Angel Invest. Qorelo, founded in late 2025, says its platform cuts SAP delivery timelines by up to 45%.

That platform targets a hard calendar deadline. SAP has told its customers to migrate from the older ECC system to S/4HANA by the 2027 deadline, and Qorelo puts the active migration pipeline at 35,000 customers, with each project running 18 to 36 months. The bottleneck is people, not software licences: according to figures the company cites, 8% of ERP migrations finish on time, 30% run longer than planned, and more than 60% slip on budget, schedule, or quality. Qorelo’s first live customer is a major German automotive group, and the HPI Ventures partner leading the round identified that customer by name as Mercedes-Benz. The new capital is to be spent on engineering hires, SAP expertise, and enterprise sales capacity in Europe.

A $3.5M Seed Built Around a 2027 Deadline

The mechanics of the round are simple: $3.5 million of seed capital, two co-leads, four additional backers, and a company that incorporated in late 2025. What makes the deal stand out is the size of the problem Qorelo is selling into. Every SAP customer with ECC running in production now has a hard stop before the 2027 deadline, and the consultancies that traditionally run those migrations are already booked into 2027 themselves. Qorelo’s weekly insights on SAP delivery show the company writing about the deadline as a market event, not a software update.

Qorelo is positioning itself as the automation layer for the workstream that consultants would otherwise staff. The platform takes the repetitive parts of an S/4HANA programme, the documentation, the configuration, and the test scripts, and turns them into structured outputs the consultant team can review. The company frames that as both a faster project and a permanent system of record, with the operational data of each transformation kept ready to feed future AI applications after go-live. The pitch to investors is that this is the part of the SAP delivery market that has not been automated, and that the 2027 deadline is what is forcing the spending. The seed round is small by enterprise-software standards, but it is sized to fund a team that can ride the deadline.

Three Co-Founders, All Under 30

Nicholas Arman Maxwell Torabi is 19. His co-founders, Louis Andrea Schmidlin and Marino Kurtović, are 24 and 28. None of the three had shipped a major enterprise product before Qorelo, and the company’s S/4HANA migration product page lists no Fortune 500 logos, only the framing of a young team with a tooling-led answer to the SAP delivery bottleneck.

Schmidlin and Torabi write the company’s “Insights” newsletter, a Friday letter on what is and is not working in SAP delivery. Kurtović is the third co-founder and has written the company’s “Convictions for 2026” post, the closest thing the team has to a public roadmap. The round is structured as a standard seed, with no public valuation disclosed. Torabi’s name leads on the press materials, and the public comment so far is a single statement credited to all three founders.

The public framing of the round has been Torabi’s, who set out the company view in comments reported alongside the deal. Schmidlin and Kurtović join him in signing off on the round, but neither has given a separate public statement on the deal.

Large enterprises are facing an unprecedented race against time to modernise their digital backbones before the 2027 deadline, but the industry simply lacks the human delivery capacity to make it happen. At Qorelo, we have built an elegant solution that automates the repetitive functional workstreams of these massive transformations.

Torabi, speaking after the round closed, called the new capital a tool to scale the platform into more of the SAP delivery market and to fund the next phase of engineering hires. The HPI Ventures-led round, in his telling, is the first step in a multi-year build against the 2027 deadline. The company is hiring across engineering, SAP expertise, and enterprise sales as it expands.

The Round Rides on a 2027 Calendar

The fundraise lands at a moment defined by a hard calendar. SAP’s end-of-support date for ECC is December 31, 2027, and every customer on the legacy stack must move to S/4HANA or off SAP entirely before that date.

The SAP ECC end-of-life migration roadmap lays out the practical sequencing: discover, design, build, test, deploy, with each phase running on its own multi-month track. Each of those tracks needs functional consultants, and Qorelo puts the active pipeline at 35,000 SAP customers running migrations in parallel. With each project running 18 to 36 months, demand for delivery talent is surging into late 2026, which is also when most projects are scheduled to start their build phase.

The supply side has not kept up: consultancies and systems integrators are in hiring mode, and the gap between demand and available headcount is widening. Qorelo’s case to investors is that the gap can be closed by automating the parts of the workstream that do not require a senior consultant’s judgement. The platform handles the documentation, the trace, and the structured outputs that a programme would otherwise have to produce by hand. The freed-up consultant hours, in the company’s telling, go to the design decisions and the change management work that genuinely need a human.

That pitch is grounded in a set of hard numbers from Qorelo’s own market research, drawn from its press release and restated in the company’s briefings to media. The combination of a fixed deadline, a known labour gap, and a recurring failure rate on existing programmes is the part of the story that explains why a 19-year-old and two co-founders under 30 were able to raise from institutional European investors on a five-month-old company. The bottleneck is a software problem, the company says, and software is what Qorelo sells.

• 8% of ERP migrations are completed on time
• Projects extend about 30% beyond their planned duration
• More than 60% go off track on budget, schedule, or quality
• 35,000 SAP customers are currently migrating to S/4HANA
• Each migration runs between 18 and 36 months
• Qorelo says its platform reduces delivery timelines by up to 45%

What Qorelo’s AI Replaces in a SAP Programme

The product is built around one specific workstream: the functional delivery process inside an S/4HANA programme. That workstream covers the discovery workshops, the fit-gap analysis, the build of functional specifications, the configuration documentation, and the cutover plans. In a traditional engagement, those artefacts are produced by a team of functional consultants working with the client’s process owners, and they tend to be the slowest and most labour-intensive parts of the project. The bottleneck is the documentation itself, not the design decisions. The platform’s job is to take the documentation off the consultant’s plate.

Qorelo’s automation targets the parts of the workstream that follow a defined structure, repeat across projects, and produce outputs a consultant team can review. The platform reads the source SAP configuration, generates the fit-gap documentation, drafts the functional specs, and produces the test scripts in a format the consultant team can edit and approve. The result, the company says, is a programme that runs 45% faster end to end, with the consultant team focused on the design decisions and the change management work that genuinely need a human. The company argues that automation can compress the consultant hours required per migration by 45%, which on a market growing from €37.8 billion to €60.2 billion implies a meaningful shift in who captures the value of the spend.

The company also positions the platform as a permanent system of record for the programme, not a one-off tool. Each transformation produces a structured data layer that Qorelo can keep updating after go-live, with the operational data of the running SAP system kept ready for future AI applications. That is where the product’s “Evolve” offering sits, a continuous optimisation service layered on top of the original migration.

Inside the customer, the platform is designed to be used by a defined set of roles that are common to every large SAP programme.

• Solution architects
• Process owners
• Functional leads
• Programme leadership (PMO and transformation leads)
• SAP Centre of Excellence teams

For consultancies, the pitch is to win more contracts, deliver faster, and scale delivery capacity without adding headcount. For in-house enterprise teams, the pitch is the inverse: reduce reliance on external consultancies and keep SAP expertise in-house. Both pitches rest on the same product surface.

A Mercedes-Benz Reference and a DACH Pipeline

Qorelo’s first public customer reference is a major German automotive group now using the platform for its SAP transformation and the operational processes that follow go-live. The company does not name the customer in its own materials, framing it only as a leading German automotive enterprise. The HPI Ventures partner who co-led the round identified the customer by name as Mercedes-Benz in his written comments on the deal. The reference is therefore a third-party attribution rather than a customer-quoted one, and Qorelo’s own materials stay on the “major German automotive group” framing.

The deployment is structured as a transformation programme that expands into native operations once go-live is complete. Qorelo’s framing is that the platform’s value compounds after the migration, since the structured data layer the platform produces during the project becomes the input to the continuous optimisation work that follows. The automotive customer is the live proof of that claim, even if the company is not yet naming the project publicly.

The DACH focus is deliberate. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland hold the largest concentration of ECC installations in Europe, and the German-speaking consulting market is the deepest in the world for SAP delivery talent. Starting there gives Qorelo a customer base that already runs the most complex programmes, with the most stringent data residency and security requirements, and the most exacting reference customers for future sales. The company’s weekly insights on SAP delivery draw most of their case material from DACH engagements.

Modernising the enterprise tech stack is one of the hardest problems on any CIO’s desk. These are multi-year programmes where most of the risk and cost sits in slow, manual, expert-dependent work. Qorelo is the AI companion that carries enterprises and their consultants through it, turning fragmented discovery and scoping into structured, traceable progress, while keeping people in control. In a remarkably short time, this young founding team has won the trust of demanding enterprise customers like Mercedes-Benz, building the kind of early traction and commercial instinct that is rare at this stage.

Schmidt-Sceery, a partner at HPI Ventures, framed the investment in language that puts the customer reference at the centre of his thesis. In his written comments on the deal, he credited the trust of demanding enterprise customers including Mercedes-Benz as the signal he was underwriting. In his framing, the company’s tooling fits the long-running cost problem inside SAP transformations.

Sizing the €37.8 Billion Market

The seed round is being raised against a market Qorelo sizes at €37.8 billion ($44 billion) in 2025, projected to reach €60.2 billion ($70 billion) by 2030. That figure covers the global SAP application services market for S/4HANA transformation and optimisation, and it is the number Qorelo is using to anchor the company’s long-term case to investors and hires.

The growth curve in that projection is tied directly to the 2027 deadline. Every customer on ECC must move to S/4HANA, and the spending on that move flows through the application services market that Qorelo is targeting. The same deadline is also the reason the market grows even as the migration wave peaks: customers that complete the move by 2027 will spend the following years on optimisation, clean core maintenance, and the AI work that runs on top of S/4HANA. Forrester, in its own analysis of the migration options for SAP ECC customers, frames the deadline as the trigger for a multi-year wave of new programmes and re-platformed contracts.

The analysis of SAP ECC migration options lays out the standard suite of choices, from RISE with SAP to selective data transition, with the cost and timeline trade-offs of each. The structural bottleneck Qorelo is selling against sits inside that market: there are not enough senior functional consultants to staff the migration wave, and the consultancies that own the work are raising prices accordingly. Automation, the company says, can compress the consultant hours required per migration by 45%. The market growing from €37.8 billion to €60.2 billion over the same period is the multiplier on that compression. In short, the value of the spend shifts from the consultancies to the software layer over the next five years.

What the Money Buys First

The headline use of the new capital is hiring. Qorelo says it will expand its team across engineering, SAP expertise, and enterprise sales, with a stated focus on onboarding top-tier European talent. The company frames the round as a build, not a scale, capital raise, and the next twelve months are likely to be measured in shipped product and new logos rather than international expansion.

On the engineering side, the priority is the platform’s coverage of the functional delivery workstream across the major SAP modules. On the SAP expertise side, the priority is hiring people who can run the discovery and design work the platform does not automate. On the sales side, the priority is enterprise sales capacity for the DACH market, where the company already has its first reference customer. Each of those hires is more expensive in Europe than in many other startup hubs, which is part of why the round is sized where it is.

The company has not announced a Series A target, and there is no public valuation from the seed. The next milestone, in the founders’ framing, is the next twelve months of product development and customer growth. The 2027 deadline, and the 35,000-strong customer pipeline behind it, is the calendar the round is being measured against.