SAP to Acquire Prior Labs to Build Frontier AI Lab in Europe

May 4, 2026
SAP has agreed to acquire Prior Labs, a Freiburg-based pioneer in Tabular Foundation Models, to establish a frontier AI research lab in Europe. The company plans to invest over €1 billion over four years to scale the lab, which will operate independently after regulatory approval.
SAP to Acquire Prior Labs to Build Frontier AI Lab in Europe

SAP has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Prior Labs, a Freiburg-based company known for its Tabular Foundation Models, announced in a press release. The acquisition aims to establish a frontier AI research lab in Europe focused on structured business data. SAP plans to invest more than €1 billion over the next four years to expand the lab, which will operate as an independent entity once the transaction closes, pending regulatory approval.

Prior Labs specializes in models designed for structured data, enabling accurate predictions for business use cases such as supplier risk, customer churn, and payment delays. Its open-source tool TabPFN has been downloaded over 3 million times and supports a large developer community. SAP intends to continue supporting this open-source approach.

The acquisition will bring Prior Labs’ research team and its TabPFN-2.6 model, which leads performance benchmarks for tabular AI, into SAP’s ecosystem. The lab will contribute to SAP’s AI portfolio, including SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud, and the Joule agentic layer. SAP expects the transaction to close in the second or third quarter of 2026.

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