SAP has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Prior Labs, a pioneer in Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs). This strategic move is designed to accelerate SAP’s advancements in AI-native solutions for structured business data, building upon the foundations laid by its SAP-RPT-1 model. By integrating one of the world's premier TFM research teams, SAP aims to bridge the gap where standard Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex numerical and statistical datasets.
SAP to acquire Prior Labs to establish a globally leading frontier AI lab focused on structured data.
SAP commits to investing over €1 billion over the next four years to scale TFM research and development.
Prior Labs will operate as an independent entity to maintain research velocity and innovation.
The acquisition aims to enhance predictive capabilities for business outcomes like supplier risk and customer churn.
SAP remains committed to Prior Labs' open-source strategy, including the widely adopted TabPFN tool.
The transaction is expected to close in Q2 or Q3 of 2026, pending customary regulatory approvals.
Unlike LLMs, which are primarily designed for language processing, TFMs are purpose-built for the structured data that powers global business operations. These models provide accurate predictions regarding payment delays, supply chain vulnerabilities, and upsell opportunities by understanding tables and statistics natively. SAP CTO Philipp Herzig noted that the acquisition represents a major opportunity to lead the category of AI built specifically for the structured data running enterprise systems.
The integration of Prior Labs into the SAP ecosystem will provide the research team with the resources, data environments, and customer reach necessary to scale TFMs to their full potential. The new lab will work alongside SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud, and the Joule agentic layer to bring frontier research into direct productization across SAP’s extensive portfolio.
Prior Labs' TabPFN-2.6 currently leads the TabArena benchmark, matching the accuracy of traditional automated machine learning pipelines instantly. The technology allows business users to interact with data through conversational interfaces, running "what-if" scenarios and receiving instant predictions without the need for extensive model training. This in-context learning approach ensures faster time to value while maintaining GDPR compliance.
By moving beyond simple correlation to causal inference, SAP and Prior Labs intend to transform how businesses interpret their data. The goal is to power agentic AI systems that can reason through high-level goals by combining tables, language, and images, providing users with deeper insights into not just what will happen, but why it will happen.
The partnership also benefits from a high-level scientific advisory board, including Turing Award winner Yann LeCun and Max Planck Institute Director Bernhard Schölkopf, ensuring that the lab remains at the cutting edge of global AI research.
About Prior Labs
Prior Labs is the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models, a new category of AI purpose-built for structured data. Founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann & Sauraj Gambhir, Prior Labs' TabPFN model series, published in Nature, set the state-of-the-art on tabular benchmarks across hundreds of independent academic studies. Prior Labs is scaling tabular foundation models to handle millions of rows, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to deploy them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth.
Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and offices in Berlin and New York City, Prior Labs has built one of the leading AI research teams globally, with researchers recruited from Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. www.priorlabs.ai
About SAP
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience.
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