SAP Backs Prior Labs with €1 Billion

A serious cash injection just landed for one of Europe's frontier AI labs. According to the company's own press release, Freiburg- and Berlin-based Prior Labs has officially closed its acquisition by SAP, backed by more than one billion euros of investment over the next four years. The deal, first announced back in May, got its final regulatory sign off on 17 July.

Here's the twist: Prior Labs isn't disappearing into SAP's org chart. The startup keeps its name, its team, its headquarters in Freiburg plus its offices in Berlin and New York, and its research mission. It will keep running as an independent lab, just with a much bigger budget and a direct line into SAP's huge customer base.

So what does Prior Labs actually do? While most of the AI world chases chatbots and language models, this team went after something less flashy but arguably just as important: tables, spreadsheets and structured data, the stuff that actually runs businesses and science. Their open source model TabPFN was published in Nature, has racked up over a thousand citations, and has been downloaded more than three million times. The newer TabPFN 2.6 currently sits on top of the TabArena leaderboard, and TabPFN 3 is reportedly on the way.

Founders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir describe the SAP deal as the next chapter rather than an ending, with plans to combine tabular models with reasoning about cause and effect, and to link tables with language.