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SAP to Acquire Prior Labs in €1 Billion Bet on Tabular AI

The move signals a push toward AI built for structured enterprise data rather than text-first language models.

Overview

  • SAP and Prior Labs signed a definitive acquisition agreement on Monday, with closing targeted for the second or third quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval.
  • SAP plans to invest more than €1 billion over four years to build a Europe-based frontier research lab focused on AI that reads tables, numbers and statistics.
  • Prior Labs will operate as an independent unit and keep its open-source TabPFN work, and SAP will integrate its models into SAP AI Core, Business Data Cloud and the Joule agent layer.
  • Founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir, Prior Labs reports over 3 million downloads of TabPFN, and its TabPFN-2.6 model sits at the top of the TabArena benchmark for tabular AI.
  • SAP did not disclose the purchase price, though TechCrunch cited sources who say the deal was almost all cash with well over half a billion dollars paid up front to the founders.