By OpenAI COO’s own admission final February, ‘we have now not but actually seen AI penetrate enterprise enterprise processes.’ However for enterprise software program big SAP, whose inventory has dropped considerably in 2026 partly from the ‘SaaSpocalypse’the difficulty remains to be entrance and heart.
On Monday, the European heavyweight introduced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed quantity. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to speculate €1 billion (roughly $1.16 billion) into the enterprise over the following 4 years to develop it into an AI lab targeted on structured knowledge — the tables and databases the place enterprise info sometimes sits.
SAP declined to reveal how a lot it spent on the acquisition itself, however sources told Pathfounders that this was a wholesome exit: an “nearly all money” deal, with properly over half a billion {dollars} in money up entrance for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir.
The trio cofounded Prior Labs simply 18 months in the past with a concentrate on tabular basis fashions (TFMs) — AI fashions that may make predictions from knowledge that sits in tables and databases. That is probably a greater match for enterprises than language fashions. It’s definitely a greater match for SAP, whose extensively used software program merchandise for accounting, HR, procurement and expense administration depend on its database.
Nonetheless, Germany’s most respected firm additionally appears be taking part in protection because the tech trade marches in direction of agentic AI. Whereas it really works to create its personal AI lab, the corporate has blocked OpenClaw and every other agent tech that it has not explicitly licensed, The Information was first to identify.
In response to a request for remark, SAP’s press division referred TechCrunch’s to the corporate’s latest API policywhich does say that SAP “prohibits” AI brokers from accessing its merchandise by its API apart from these which are “SAP-endorsed architectures.”
Approved architectures after all embody SAP’s personal providing, Joule Agentsnonetheless in beta, which lets clients create their very own brokers. Nvidia additionally announced in March that SAP’s Joule helps Nvidia’s Agent Toolkitwhich is software program for managing brokers. This toolkit is the muse for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Therefore SAP clients shall be licensed to make use of NemoClaw brokers.
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For a large incumbent participant like SAP, AI is each a menace and a possibility. “It’s all about how shortly (we are able to) as SAP really additionally embark (on) these applied sciences in our R&D portfolio to maintain the relative economies of scale benefit,” CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January.
SAP hasn’t been sitting on its palms. The German firm invested in generative AI companies that develop language fashions massive and small: in 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic — in addition to Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now intend to merge to kind “a world AI powerhouse.”
It had additionally developed SAP-RPT-1a relational pretrained transformer mannequin. “Early on, SAP acknowledged that the best untapped alternative in enterprise AI wasn’t massive language fashions; it was AI constructed for the structured knowledge that runs the world’s companies,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig declared in an announcement.
However Prior Labs’ acquisition is a major shortcut in that path. Its TabPFN mannequin sequence has skilled plenty of traction amongst builders. In a blog post on the deal, the startup’s founders stated that its open-source fashions have been downloaded over three million instances.
In a press launch, SAP promised that Prior Labs will preserve the open-source variations: “The lab will function as an unbiased unit to make sure analysis velocity whereas SAP offers long-term funding and a direct path to productization throughout the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Enterprise Knowledge Cloud in addition to the agentic layer with Joule.”
SAP and the startup headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope that this funding will result in TFMs that may seize knowledge within the tables the place it lives, mix that with language, reasoning and area data.
Greater than that, they hope that Prior Labs, with this “large enhance” from SAP, can turn out to be a brand new “globally-leading frontier AI lab for structured knowledge — in Europe, within the open,” founder and CEO Frank Hutter celebrated in a post on X.
In February 2025, the startup had beforehand raised some $9.3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Balderton Capital — greater than competitor Neuralk-AIhowever rather a lot lower than Fundamentalwhich emerged out of stealth with a $255 million Collection A in February.
In a publish on XBalderton companion James Sensible referred to as Prior Labs’ acquisition “certainly one of Germany’s greatest ever enterprise outcomes.” As for SAP, its inventory is at present buying and selling barely upwards.
In the meantime, SAP is being very strict as to the brokers it’s going to enable into its ecosystem. This can be a wildly totally different strategy than Salesforce, one other incumbent caught in the SaaSpocalypse. It’s permitting enterprise to decide on their very own brokers, together with OpenClaw in the event that they so want, with its new Headless 360 architecture.
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