Acquisition doubles down on SAP’s early mover advantage in tabular foundation models
WALLDORF and FREIBURG — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and Prior Labs, the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs), announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for SAP to purchase Prior Labs, accelerating SAP’s success in TFMs that started with SAP-RPT-1, and bringing one of the world’s leading TFM research teams into the SAP family.
Prior Labs will continue to operate as an independent entity, with SAP committing to invest more than €1 billion over the next four years to scale it into a globally leading frontier AI lab for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is still pending regulatory approval.
Large language models (LLMs) struggle to make accurate predictions on structured business data because they have only a rudimentary understanding of tables, numbers and statistics. Unlike LLMs, TFMs are purpose-built 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.
“Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig said. “We built SAP-RPT-1 to prove that conviction for enterprise data. Prior Labs has built a leading TFM on public benchmarks and built one of the leading research teams in this category. Combining their frontier model work with enterprise data and customer reach is how we intend to lead this category globally.”
