SAP acquires Prior Labs just 18 months after launch in €1B+ deal

The acquisition gives the 18-month-old German company the resources to scale its pioneering tabular foundation models while remaining an independent AI research lab.

SAP has acquired the German-founded frontier AI company Prior Labs for over €1 billion. The transaction, which comes just 18 months after Prior Labs was founded, establishes it as one of Europe’s pre-eminent AI research labs. 

Prior Labs pioneered tabular foundation models (TFMs), a category of AI purpose-built for enterprise data. Rather than requiring organisations to train a separate AI model for every dataset, TabPFN uses a single pre-trained foundation model capable of solving prediction tasks such as payment delays, churn, supplier risk and demand forecasting directly from structured enterprise data.

Its technology is already helping prevent train failures with Hitachi, improve financial forecasting with TD, and has been applied across hundreds of published research projects, from pancreatic cancer diagnosis to wildfire prediction to next-generation battery materials. 

TabPFN-3-Thinking, the company’s latest model, is state-of-the-art and enterprise-grade for all prediction tasks.  SAP’s investment will fund infrastructure, hiring, and long-term frontier research.

Prior Labs will continue under its own brand, leadership, research agenda and customer relationships, publish its research and make its models openly available, with SAP’s support.

With the help of SAP’s enterprise data ecosystem and global scale, the company plans to build the next generation of foundation models for enterprise data.

“Eighteen months ago, Prior Labs was a research project,” said Frank Hutter, Co-founder and CEO of Prior Labs.

“Today we’re beginning our next chapter as an AI lab with the resources to tackle problems we simply couldn’t before. Taking tabular foundation models to the next level requires better data environments, deployment surfaces, and long-term research investment, and SAP is uniquely positioned to provide all of these.” 

The acquisition by SAP enables Prior Labs to pursue multi-year frontier research programmes that would have been out of reach for an 18-month-old company.

Access to enterprise data environments and long-term investment will allow the company to pursue more ambitious research across enterprise AI, scientific discovery, causality, relational data and agentic systems, as well as even more ambitious “moonshots” towards solving some of the most important problems of our time, e.g. medical data and material sciences.

“Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” said Philipp Herzig, CTO of SAP.

“Prior Labs has defined the category of TFMs and has built the world’s strongest research team in this category, topping the public benchmarks since day one. Combining their frontier model work with enterprise data and customer reach is how we intend to lead this category globally.”