SAP has acquired the German-founded frontier AI company Prior Labs for over €1 billion. The transaction, which comes just 18 months after Prior Labs was founded, establishes it as one of Europe’s pre-eminent AI research labs.
Prior Labs pioneered tabular foundation models (TFMs), a category of AI purpose-built for enterprise data. Rather than requiring organisations to train a separate AI model for every dataset, TabPFN uses a single pre-trained foundation model capable of solving prediction tasks such as payment delays, churn, supplier risk and demand forecasting directly from structured enterprise data.
Its technology is already helping prevent train failures with Hitachi, improve financial forecasting with TD, and has been applied across hundreds of published research projects, from pancreatic cancer diagnosis to wildfire prediction to next-generation battery materials.
TabPFN-3-Thinking, the company's latest model, is state-of-the-art and enterprise-grade for all prediction tasks. SAP's investment will fund infrastructure, hiring, and long-term frontier research.
Prior Labs will continue under its own brand, leadership, research agenda and customer relationships, publish its research and make its models openly available, with SAP's support.
