German software titan SAP has agreed to acquire Freiburg-based Prior Labs, which develops tabular foundation models designed to analyse business data in tables and spreadsheets, for an undisclosed sum.
The startup will continue to operate separately, and SAP will invest more than €1bn in the startup over the next four years to scale it globally, SAP said in a press release.
The acquisition is notably a fast one for European tech: it comes less than 15 months after the startup’s first and only €9m funding round in February of last year. Prior Labs was founded in 2024.
The SAP acquisition will also provide an exit for several European VCs, including Balderton Capital, Atlantic Labs and XTX Ventures. Others who have backed the startup include a number of angel investors like Black Forest Labs’ cofounder Robin Rombach and Hugging Face cofounder Thomas Wolf.
“Most of the world's valuable data still sits in spreadsheets and databases. Replacing hand-tuned gradient-boosted trees with a one-shot model will do for structured data what LLMs have done for unstructured [data],” Balderton partner James Wise said in a LinkedIn post, adding that the acquisition “feels particularly fast as an outcome.”
Prior Labs builds tabular models to help businesses make predictions on structured data. It’s an area of increasing interest for big companies like SAP: “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 in a statement.
Former Meta chief AI scientist and now-founder of world models startup AMI Labs, Yann LeCun, is also an advisor to the startup, according to its site.
