Berlin-based frontier AI lab Prior Labs today announced that the multinational software company SAP has completed its acquisition of the company, supported by more than €1 billion in investment from SAP in order to fund infrastructure, hiring, and long-term frontier research. Prior Labs will continue under its own brand, leadership,
David Cendon Garcia
Berlin-based frontier AI lab Prior Labs today announced that the multinational software company SAP has completed its acquisition of the company, supported by more than €1 billion in investment from SAP in order to 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. All of this follows their €9 million pre-Seed round in 2025.
“Eighteen months ago, Prior Labs was a research project,” says 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.”
“Early on, SAP recognised 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,” adds 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.”
Founded in 2024, Prior Labs is an innovator of tabular foundation models (TFMs), a category of AI purpose-built for enterprise data. It was founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir.
The company 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.
Today’s acquisition by SAP allows Prior Labs to deploy these models across the industries where enterprise data carries the most value.
This acquisition 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.
