SAP has agreed to acquire Prior Labs, a Freiburg-based startup developing AI foundation models for tabular and structured business data, for an undisclosed sum. SAP will invest more than €1 billion over four years to scale the company globally, while Prior Labs continues to operate independently.
Founded in 2024 and backed by Balderton Capital, Atlantic Labs, and XTX Ventures, the startup raised just €9 million before the acquisition — making the exit notably swift by European standards. Angel backers include Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, with former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun serving as an advisor.
SAP CTO Philipp Herzig framed the deal as targeting the largest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI — applying foundation models to the structured data that underpins global business operations, rather than unstructured text.