The software company SAP has completed the acquisition of Freiburg-based AI startup Prior Labs. According to its own statements, the company is investing more than one billion euros over four years to build the 2024-founded firm into an independent European AI research lab. Prior Labs remains an independent subsidiary with its own name.
Deal brings tabular-data specialist to SAP
SAP announced the acquisition in May and has now officially closed the deal, according to a recent announcement. The purchase price stays under wraps; SAP names only the planned investment volume of more than one billion euros through 2030. Prior Labs was founded in 2024 in Freiburg as a spin-off from the AI research of Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. In its pre-seed round, the team raised nine million euros according to TechFundingNews, led by Balderton Capital and XTX Ventures, with Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Black Forest Labs founder Robin Rombach as angel investors. Eighteen months after its founding, the team is now selling to the Walldorf-based software company. Prior Labs remains an independent brand and subsidiary based in Freiburg, with additional offices in Berlin and New York. SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig justifies the purchase by arguing that the biggest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI lies not with language models but with structured business data — an area where SAP has access to vast amounts of data through its business software.
Model processes tables instead of running text
Unlike large language models, Prior Labs’ AI model TabPFN analyzes tables and databases, such as customer lists, payment histories, or sensor readings, and delivers predictions directly, without experts needing to train their own model first. The current version counts more than four million downloads via the Hugging Face platform, where the model is freely available, according to TechFundingNews — the figure is independently unverified. Use cases range from payment defaults and customer churn to demand forecasting; external reports also cite wildfire prediction and train-delay forecasting. For SAP customers, that could mean spreadsheets and business databases will soon deliver forecasts automatically, without setting up a separate machine-learning project. Prior Labs founder Frank Hutter says that eighteen months ago his company was still a research project, and now the next chapter begins as an AI lab with far more resources. Competition for specialized tabular AI has so far come mainly from research and smaller providers, while Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have so far tied their cloud databases more to generic language-model features.
What remains open is how deeply SAP will build the tabular AI into existing products like the S/4HANA business suite, and whether Prior Labs stays visible as an independent brand for outside customers. What will matter is whether the Freiburg team can keep its research pace as part of a global software group.
