SAP has completed its acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Prior Labs and committed to investing more than €1 billion over the next four years to establish a globally leading frontier AI research lab focused on structured business data and Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs).
SAP has completed its acquisition of Prior Labs, a specialist in Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs), as it strengthens its enterprise AI strategy and expands its research capabilities in structured business data.
Prior Labs will continue to operate as an independent entity, with SAP investing more than €1 billion over the next four years to develop it into a globally leading frontier AI lab. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The acquisition builds on SAP’s existing work in TFMs following the development of SAP-RPT-1. Unlike large language models (LLMs), which are designed primarily for language tasks, TFMs are purpose-built to analyse structured business data such as tables, numbers and statistics.
According to SAP, the technology is designed to improve predictions across business processes, including payment delays, supplier risks, customer churn risk and upsell opportunities.
“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, Chief Technology Officer, SAP.
“We built SAP-RPT-1 to prove that conviction for enterprise data. Prior Labs has built a leading TFM on public benchmarks and built one of the leading research teams in this category. Combining their frontier model work with enterprise data and customer reach is how we intend to lead this category globally.”
With the acquisition completed, Prior Labs will operate as an independent AI research unit while benefiting from SAP’s long-term investment and product development capabilities.
The research developed by Prior Labs will be integrated into SAP’s portfolio through SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud and the Joule agentic AI layer.
“Over the last 18 months, Prior Labs has built an incredible team, increasing the velocity in tabular foundation models,” said Frank Hutter, Chief Executive Officer, Prior Labs.
“Joining the SAP family gives us the resources, data environment and customer reach to take this category to its full potential.”
Open-source strategy and research team remain in place
Prior Labs’ open-source TabPFN technology has been downloaded more than 3 million times and supports a broad developer community. SAP said it will continue supporting the company’s open-source strategy.
The Prior Labs co-founders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir will continue to lead the research team. SAP also confirmed that Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schoelkopf will serve on Prior Labs’ scientific advisory board as the lab expands.
Prior Labs’ latest TabPFN-2.6 model currently tops the TabArena benchmark for Tabular Foundation Models and is designed to deliver predictive accuracy comparable to a four-hour automated machine learning (ML) pipeline in a single model.
SAP said the technology will allow business users to interact with structured data using natural language, generate or select datasets, and run “what-if” scenarios without requiring specialist data science or machine learning expertise.
The company also said its use of in-context learning will enable users to receive predictions without training new models, allowing a single TFM to adapt to multiple business use cases while supporting faster time to value with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.
The acquisition strengthens SAP’s ability to deliver predictive AI systems that understand structured business data natively while combining tables, language and images to support agentic AI applications.
It plans to turn Prior Labs’ research into enterprise-ready innovation, helping organisations extract greater value from business data by improving predictive capabilities and supporting more advanced reasoning
