Through the acquisition, SAP consolidates its early lead in tabular foundation models

Walldorf and Freiburg — May 4, 2026 — SAP SE and Prior Labs, the pioneer of tabular foundation models (TFMs), announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which SAP will acquire Prior Labs. This will accelerate SAP's TFM journey that began with RPT‑1 and welcome one of the world's leading tabular foundation model research teams to the SAP family.

Prior Labs will continue to operate as a separate entity following the completion of the acquisition. SAP is committed to investing more than one billion euros over the next four years to build Prior Labs into a world-leading frontier AI lab for structured data – the data on which the world's businesses run. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. The completion of the takeover is still subject to official approvals.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to make accurate predictions on structured business data because they only have a rudimentary understanding of tables, numbers, and statistics. Unlike LLMs, TFMs are specifically designed for this type of data and can accurately predict business outcomes based on tabular data such as payment delays, supplier risks, upsell opportunities, customer churn risk, and more.

“SAP recognized early on that the biggest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI lies not in large language models, but in AI designed for the structured data on which the world's companies rely,” said SAP CTO Philipp Herzig. “We developed RPT-1 to support this belief in enterprise data. Prior Labs has developed a leading TFM based on public benchmarks and has one of the world's leading research teams in this field. Combining Prior Labs' innovative modeling work with enterprise data and SAP's global customer base represents a promising approach to leading this category internationally.”

“Over the last 18 months, Prior Labs has built an incredible team and increased the speed of development on basic tabular models,” said Frank Hutter, CEO of Prior Labs. “The planned addition to the SAP family gives us the resources, data environment and customer reach to realize the full potential of this category.”

Following the completion of the transaction, SAP will have a unique opportunity with Prior Labs to build an industry-leading AI research laboratory and establish a new category in the field of TFM. The lab will operate as a stand-alone unit to ensure research speed, while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to translation into products across the SAP portfolio – with SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud and the agentic layer with Joule.

With over 3 million downloads, Prior Labs Tab PFN is a widely used open source tabular AI tool that supports a dynamic developer ecosystem. SAP is fully committed to continuing to support this open source strategy. Prior Labs founders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir lead a team of world-class AI researchers and practitioners. The company works with leaders in AI research, including Yann LeCun (winner of the ACM AM Turing Award and Executive Chairman of Advanced Machine Intelligence) and Bernhard Schölkopf (Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems; President of ELLIS). Both will serve on Prior Labs' scientific advisory board as the company evolves into a world-leading AI laboratory.

Accelerated innovation

TabPFN-2.6 from Prior Labs is the best performing model on TabArena, the leading benchmark for TFM. TabPFN-2.6 achieves the accuracy of a four-hour automated machine learning pipeline – instantly, in a single model, and at a fraction of the complexity.

An overlying conversational user interface allows business users to ask questions in natural language, generate or select datasets, and run what-if scenarios without having to be data science and machine learning experts. With Prior Labs models, SAP offers contextual learning, allowing users to provide data sets to get instant, reliable predictions without the need for model training. A single TFM can adapt on the fly to suit any business use case, resulting in a faster time to value while remaining compliant with GDPR.

With Prior Labs, SAP will deliver TFMs with superior predictive capability that understand tables natively, learn statistical reasoning directly from data, and power agentic AI systems capable of understanding high-level goals, combining tables, language, and images to draw conclusions, integrating domain knowledge, inferring causality, and adapting dynamically.

Once the transaction closes, SAP and Prior Labs plan to translate cutting-edge AI research into enterprise-ready innovations to help customers derive even more value from their tabular business data. True artificial intelligence requires going beyond correlations to understand causality. The answer to the question “What will happen?” is useful, but the answer to the question “Why will it happen?” is transformative.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions including regulatory approvals.

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