SAP Acquires Berlin’s Prior Labs
Berlin-based Prior Labs, a pioneer in tabular AI, has announced an agreement to be acquired by SAP, marking a significant milestone for the company and the broader AI landscape.
The deal, whose financial terms remain undisclosed, positions Prior Labs as SAP’s next frontier AI lab, with plans to operate independently while retaining its brand, mission, and open-source commitments. SAP has pledged over 1 billion EUR in investment over the next four years, accelerating Prior Labs’ research and product integration across SAP’s portfolio.
The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for tabular foundation models, a niche Prior Labs has championed. Their groundbreaking TabPFN, published in Nature and cited over 1,000 times, has set new benchmarks in AI-driven data analysis. With TabPFN-2.6 leading the TabArena rankings and TabPFN-3 on the horizon, the company’s open-source models have garnered over three million downloads, fostering a rapidly growing developer community.
SAP’s early recognition of tabular AI’s potential, demonstrated by its RPT-1 model, aligns with Prior Labs’ vision. The partnership will enable Prior Labs to tackle ambitious research—such as causal reasoning and domain-specific knowledge integration—while scaling its impact across high-value industries like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Prior Labs will maintain its autonomy, including its headquarters in Freiburg and offices in Berlin and New York, ensuring continuity for its customers, open-source projects, and academic collaborations.
The co-founders—Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir—expressed gratitude to their community, investors, and team, emphasizing that the mission remains unchanged, only accelerated. “Our models stay open. Our research stays public,” they stated in the press release, reaffirming their commitment to transparency and innovation.
