SAP bets $1.16B on 18-month-old German AI lab and says yes to NemoClaw

Source: TechCrunch

By OpenAI COO’s own admission last February, “we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.”
But for enterprise‑software giant SAP, whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026—partly because of the “SaaSpocalypse”—the issue is still front‑and‑center.

SAP to acquire Prior Labs

On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs (SAP press release) for an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest €1 billion (≈ $1.16 billion) over the next four years to grow the business into an AI lab focused on structured data—the tables and databases where enterprise information typically sits.

• SAP declined to disclose the purchase price, but Pathfounders reported an “almost all‑cash” deal with well over half a billion dollars paid up‑front to the founders—Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir.
• The trio co‑founded Prior Labs just 18 months ago, concentrating on tabular foundation models (TFMs)—AI models that predict from data stored in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than large language models and aligns closely with SAP’s core products (accounting, HR, procurement, expense management) that rely on relational data.

SAP’s defensive posture on agentic AI

While building its own AI lab, SAP appears to be playing defense as the tech industry moves toward agentic AI. The company has blocked OpenClaw and any other unauthorized agent technology, as first reported by The Information.

SAP’s press department pointed to the company’s latest API policy, which states that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API unless they are “SAP‑endorsed architectures.”

• Authorized architectures include SAP’s own Joule Agents (still in beta), which lets customers create their own agents.
• Nvidia announced in March that SAP’s Joule supports Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit (announcement), the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise‑ready, security‑focused OpenClaw competitor NemoClaw. Consequently, SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents.

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Why AI matters to SAP

For a giant incumbent like SAP, AI is both threat and opportunity. As CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January:

“It’s all about how quickly we can, as SAP, actually also embark on these technologies in our R&D portfolio to keep the relative economies of scale advantage.”

SAP has not been idle:

• Investments in generative‑AI startups – In 2023, SAP backed Anthropic, Aleph Alpha, and Cohere (the latter two now intend to merge into a “global AI powerhouse” – see TechCrunch).

• Development of SAP‑RPT‑1, a relational pretrained transformer model. As SAP CTO Philipp Herzig explained:

  “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.”

Prior Labs acquisition – a shortcut to structured‑data AI

Prior Labs’ TabPFN model series has gained strong traction among developers. In a blog post about the deal, the founders noted that their open‑source models have been downloaded over three million times.

SAP’s press release promised that Prior Labs will keep its open‑source versions:

“The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research velocity while SAP provides long‑term investment and a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.”

Both SAP and the Freiburg‑based startup hope the investment will yield TFMs that can extract data directly from tables, combine it with language, reasoning, and domain knowledge, and ultimately become a “globally‑leading frontier AI lab for structured data — in Europe, in the open.” The sentiment was echoed by founder‑CEO Frank Hutter in a post on X.

Prior Labs’ funding background

In February 2025, Prior Labs raised $9.3 million in a pre‑seed round led by Balderton Capital (Fortune). This puts it ahead of competitor Neuralk‑AI in the emerging structured‑data AI space.

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About the Author

Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anna by emailing annatechcrunch [at] gmail.com.

• Freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021
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