Acquisition doubles down on SAP's early mover advantage in tabular foundation models

WALLDORF, Germany and FREIBURG, Germany, May 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE:SAP) and Prior Labs, the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs), announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for SAP to purchase Prior Labs, accelerating SAP's success in TFMs that started with SAP-RPT-1, and bringing one of the world's leading TFM research teams into the SAP family. Prior Labs will continue to operate as an independent entity, with SAP committing to invest more than €1 billion over the next four years to scale it into a globally leading frontier AI lab for the structured data that runs the world's businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is still pending regulatory approval.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to make accurate predictions on structured business data because they have only a rudimentary understanding of tables, numbers and statistics. Unlike LLMs, TFMs are purpose-built for this type of data and can accurately predict business outcomes based on tabular data such as payment delays, supplier risks, upsell opportunities, customer churn risk and more.

"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," SAP CTO Philipp Herzig said. "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."

"Over the last 18 months, Prior Labs has built an incredible team, increasing the velocity in tabular foundation models," Prior Labs CEO Frank Hutter said. "Joining the SAP family gives us the resources, data environment and customer reach to take this category to its full potential."

Once the transaction is closed, with Prior Labs, SAP will have the special opportunity to establish an industry-leading AI research lab and shape a new category in TFMs. The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research velocity, while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.

With over 3 million downloads, Prior Labs' TabPFN is a widely adopted open-source tool for tabular AI, supporting a dynamic developer ecosystem. SAP is fully committed to further support this open-source strategy. The Prior Labs cofounders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir lead a team of world-class AI researchers and practitioners. The company works with leading scientists in the field, including Yann LeCun, ACM A.M. Turing Award winner and executive chairman at Advanced Machine Intelligence, and Bernhard Schölkopf, director of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ELLIS president, both of whom will serve on Prior Labs' scientific advisory board as it scales to a globally leading frontier AI lab.

Accelerating Innovation

Prior Labs' TabPFN-2.6 is the top-performing model on TabArena, the top benchmark for TFMs. TabPFN-2.6 matches the accuracy of a four-hour automated machine learning pipeline — instantly, in a single model, at a fraction of the complexity.

With a conversational interface layered on top, business users can ask questions in natural language, generate or select datasets and run "what-if" scenarios without needing to be data science and machine learning experts. With Prior Labs' models, SAP will provide in-context learning, allowing users to provide data records to receive instant, reliable predictions without any model training. A single TFM can adapt to any business use case on the fly, resulting in faster time to value with GDPR compliance.

With Prior Labs, SAP will deliver TFMs with superior predictive capability that understand tables natively, learning statistical reasoning directly from data and will power agentic AI systems capable of understanding high-level goals, combining tables, language and images to reason, integrate domain knowledge, infer causality and adapt dynamically.

After the close, SAP and Prior Labs plan to turn top AI research into enterprise-ready innovation, allowing customers to get even more value out of their tabular business data. True intelligence requires moving beyond correlation to understand causation. Answering "What will happen?" is useful, but answering why it will happen is transformative.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 or Q3 of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

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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. For more information, visit www.sap.com

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SOURCE SAP SE

SAP to Acquire Prior Labs to Establish a Globally Leading Frontier AI Lab in Europe