By OpenAI COO’s personal admission final February, “we now have not but actually seen AI penetrate enterprise enterprise processes.” However for enterprise software program large SAP, whose inventory has dropped considerably in 2026 partially from the “SaaSpocalypse,” the problem 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 “virtually all money” deal, with nicely over half a billion {dollars} in money up entrance for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir.
The trio co-founded Prior Labs simply 18 months in the past with a deal with 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 broadly used software program merchandise for accounting, HR, procurement and expense administration depend on its database.
Nonetheless, Germany’s most precious firm additionally appears be enjoying protection because the tech trade marches towards agentic AI. Whereas it really works to create its personal AI lab, the corporate has blocked OpenClaw and another agent tech that it has not explicitly approved, The Information was first to identify.
In response to a request for remark, SAP’s press division referred TechCrunch to the corporate’s latest API policy, which does say that SAP “prohibits” AI brokers from accessing its merchandise by its API aside from these which can be “SAP-endorsed architectures.”
Licensed architectures in fact embody SAP’s personal providing, Joule Agents, nonetheless in beta, which lets clients create their very own brokers. Nvidia additionally announced in March that SAP’s Joule helps Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which is software program for managing brokers. This toolkit is the inspiration for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Therefore SAP clients will likely be approved to make use of NemoClaw brokers.
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For a large incumbent participant like SAP, AI is each a menace and a chance. “It’s all about how shortly [we can] as SAP truly 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 fingers. The German firm invested in generative AI corporations 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 type “a worldwide AI powerhouse.”
It had additionally developed SAP-RPT-1, a 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 a press release.
However Prior Labs’ acquisition is a big shortcut in that route. Its TabPFN mannequin sequence has skilled a variety of traction amongst builders. In a blog post on the deal, the startup’s founders mentioned that its open supply fashions have been downloaded over three million occasions.
In a press launch, SAP promised that Prior Labs will keep the open supply variations: “The lab will function as an unbiased unit to make sure analysis velocity whereas SAP supplies long-term funding and a direct path to productization throughout the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Enterprise Information 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 information.
Greater than that, they hope that Prior Labs, with this “huge increase” from SAP, can develop into 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-AI, however rather a lot lower than Basic, which emerged out of stealth with a $255 million Collection A in February.
In a publish on X, Balderton accomplice James Clever referred to as Prior Labs’ acquisition “one in all 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 should permit into its ecosystem. This can be a wildly totally different strategy than Salesforce, one other incumbent caught within 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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