SAP acquires Prior Labs to build a European frontier AI research lab

This article was published on May 4, 2026 Eighteen months after a €9m pre-seed, the Freiburg-based pioneer of TabPFN is being acquired by SAP and will receive more than €1bn over four years. The terms are not disclosed; the strategic intent is unmistakable. When Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir founded Prior Labs in early 2024, the AI world was paying attention to almost everything except the kind of data their company was built around. Language models were absorbing capital, attention, and graduate students. Tables, the spreadsheets and structured records that actually run businesses, were not part of the AI conversation that was supposed to produce a frontier lab. On Monday, the founders announced that this assumption is about to be tested. Prior Labs has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by SAP, with the German enterprise-software giant committing more than €1bn over the next four years to scale the startup into what it calls a globally leading frontier AI lab. It is, by some distance, the most ambitious enterprise AI research investment ever made in Europe by a European company. The transaction terms have not been disclosed. SAP’s own announcement desc