From Start-Up to Success: How Germany’s Prior Labs Raised €1 Billion and Achieved a Rapid Exit to SAP

Acquisition of Prior Labs by SAP Marks a Major Milestone in Enterprise AI

Berlin-based frontier AI lab Prior Labs has officially been acquired by the multinational software company SAP in a landmark deal that sees SAP investing over €1 billion to support the acquisition. This significant investment will be allocated towards infrastructure, hiring, and long-term frontier research efforts.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Prior Labs will continue to operate under its own brand, maintain its current leadership, research agenda, and customer relationships. The company will also continue to publish its research and make its models openly available, with full support from SAP. This acquisition comes on the heels of Prior Labs’ successful €9 million pre-Seed round in 2025.

“Eighteen months ago, Prior Labs was simply a research project,” says Frank Hutter, co-founder and CEO of Prior Labs. “Today, we are embarking on a new chapter as an AI lab with the resources needed to tackle challenges that were previously out of reach. The advancement of tabular foundation models requires enhanced data environments, deployment capabilities, and sustained research investment, all of which SAP is uniquely positioned to provide.”

SAP’s CTO, Philipp Herzig, adds, “Early on, SAP recognized the potential of enterprise AI focused on structured data, rather than just large language models. Prior Labs has been at the forefront of tabular foundation models (TFMs) and has assembled a world-class research team in this field. By combining their expertise with SAP’s enterprise data and global reach, we aim to lead this category on a global scale.”

Established in 2024, Prior Labs is known for its innovation in tabular foundation models (TFMs), a specialized form of AI designed for enterprise data. Co-founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, the company has been a trailblazer in this field, enabling organizations to leverage a single pre-trained foundation model for various prediction tasks directly from structured enterprise data.

Notably, Prior Labs’ technology has already made a significant impact, aiding in preventing train failures with Hitachi, enhancing financial forecasting with TD, and contributing to numerous research projects spanning diverse areas such as pancreatic cancer diagnosis, wildfire prediction, and advancements in battery materials.

The acquisition by SAP paves the way for Prior Labs to deploy its models across industries where enterprise data holds immense value. This strategic move enables Prior Labs to engage in multi-year frontier research programs that would have been beyond reach for a relatively young company.

With access to enterprise data environments and long-term investment, Prior Labs now has the means to embark on more ambitious research initiatives across enterprise AI, scientific exploration, causality studies, relational data analysis, and agentic systems. The company also aims to pursue bold “moonshot” projects aimed at addressing critical global challenges, such as medical data analysis and advancements in material sciences.