SAP closes Prior Labs deal with more than €1 billion commitment

SAP said on July 17, 2026 that it completed its acquisition of Prior Labs, a Freiburg-based startup behind the TabPFN family of Tabular Foundation Models. The company plans to invest more than €1 billion over the next four years to operate Prior Labs as an independent frontier AI lab focused on structured data used across business systems.

Prior Labs was founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir. Its TabPFN model series was published in Nature, and SAP said it set the state of the art on tabular benchmarks across hundreds of independent academic studies. The lab’s scientific advisory board will include Yann LeCun, an ACM A.M. Turing Award winner and executive chairman at Advanced Machine Intelligence, and Bernhard Schoelkopf, director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ELLIS president.

SAP is positioning the deal as an extension of internal work on SAP-RPT-1 and as a bet that enterprise AI will increasingly rely on models built for rows and columns in ERPs, warehouses and transaction systems. Reporting on TabPFN-2.6 described a small tabular foundation model matching the accuracy of a four-hour automated machine learning pipeline instantly, though SAP has not detailed spending allocations, product timelines, customer access or how Prior Labs’ independence will work after integration.