SAP has completed its acquisition of Berlin-based frontier AI lab Prior Labs, backed by more than €1 billion in investment, in one of Europe's largest AI deals1,2. The transaction comes just 18 months after Prior Labs was founded, following a €9 million pre-Seed round in 2025.
Prior Labs pioneered tabular foundation models (TFMs), a category of AI purpose-built for structured enterprise data. Its core product, TabPFN, uses a single pre-trained foundation model to solve prediction tasks — such as payment delays, churn, supplier risk, and demand forecasting — directly from structured data, eliminating the need for organizations to train a separate model for every dataset. The company's latest model, TabPFN-3-Thinking, is described as state-of-the-art and enterprise-grade for all prediction tasks.
The technology is already deployed in production settings. Prior Labs' models are helping prevent train failures with Hitachi and improve financial forecasting with TD, and have been applied across hundreds of published research projects spanning pancreatic cancer diagnosis, wildfire prediction, and next-generation battery materials.
SAP's investment will fund infrastructure, hiring, and long-term frontier research. SAP CTO Philipp Herzig said Prior Labs has built the world's strongest research team in the TFMs category. Prior Labs will continue under its own brand, leadership, research agenda, and customer relationships, and will publish its research and make its models openly available with SAP's support.
"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".
Prior Labs was founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. With SAP's enterprise data ecosystem and global scale, the company plans to build the next generation of foundation models for enterprise data.
ANALYSIS The deal structure — preserving Prior Labs' independent brand, leadership, and open research commitments while embedding it within SAP's enterprise data infrastructure — positions SAP to integrate TFM capabilities across its product suite without disrupting the lab's research trajectory. ANALYSIS The €1 billion-plus price tag for a company that raised only €9 million at pre-Seed underscores the premium SAP placed on acquiring a specialized AI capability in structured data prediction, a domain central to SAP's core enterprise software business.