SAP SE

Acquisition doubles down on SAP's early mover advantage in tabular foundation models

WALLDORF, Germany and FREIBURG, Germany, May 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- 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."

"Over the last 18 months, Prior Labs has built an incredible team, increasing the velocity in tabular foundation models," Prior Labs CEO Frank Hutter said. "Joining the SAP family gives us the resources, data environment and customer reach to take this category to its full potential."

Once the transaction is closed, with Prior Labs, SAP will have the special opportunity to establish an industry-leading AI research lab and shape a new category in TFMs. 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. 

With over 3 million downloads, Prior Labs' TabPFN is a widely adopted open-source tool for tabular AI, supporting a dynamic developer ecosystem. SAP is fully committed to further support this open-source strategy. The Prior Labs cofounders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir lead a team of world-class AI researchers and practitioners. The company works with leading scientists in the field, including Yann LeCun, ACM A.M. Turing Award winner and executive chairman at Advanced Machine Intelligence, and Bernhard Schölkopf, director of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ELLIS president, both of whom will serve on Prior Labs' scientific advisory board as it scales to a globally leading frontier AI lab.  

Accelerating Innovation

Prior Labs' TabPFN-2.6 is the top-performing model on TabArena, the top benchmark for TFMs. TabPFN-2.6 matches the accuracy of a four-hour automated machine learning pipeline — instantly, in a single model, at a fraction of the complexity.

With a conversational interface layered on top, business users can ask questions in natural language, generate or select datasets and run "what-if" scenarios without needing to be data science and machine learning experts. With Prior Labs' models, SAP will provide in-context learning, allowing users to provide data records to receive instant, reliable predictions without any model training. A single TFM can adapt to any business use case on the fly, resulting in faster time to value with GDPR compliance.

With Prior Labs, SAP will deliver TFMs with superior predictive capability that understand tables natively, learning statistical reasoning directly from data and will power agentic AI systems capable of understanding high-level goals, combining tables, language and images to reason, integrate domain knowledge, infer causality and adapt dynamically.

After the close, SAP and Prior Labs plan to turn top AI research into enterprise-ready innovation, allowing customers to get even more value out of their tabular business data. True intelligence requires moving beyond correlation to understand causation. Answering "What will happen?" is useful, but answering why it will happen is transformative.

The transaction is expected to close in Q2 or Q3 of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

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About Prior Labs

Prior Labs is the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models, a new category of AI purpose-built for structured data. Founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann & Sauraj Gambhir, Prior Labs' TabPFN model series, published in Nature, set the state-of-the-art on tabular benchmarks across hundreds of independent academic studies. Prior Labs is scaling tabular foundation models to handle millions of rows, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to deploy them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth.

Headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, and offices in Berlin and New York City, Prior Labs has built one of the leading AI research teams globally, with researchers recruited from Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. www.priorlabs.ai

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com 

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SOURCE SAP SE

WALLDORF, Germany and AUSTIN, Texas, May 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and Dremio today announced that SAP has agreed to acquire Dremio, an open, high-performance data lakehouse platform built to accelerate agentic AI and expand SAP Business Data Cloud's  ability to combine SAP and non-SAP data to more effectively run analytical and AI workloads in real time. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The transaction is still pending regulatory approval.

Most enterprise AI projects fail to deliver value not because of the AI itself, but because the underlying data is fragmented, locked in proprietary formats and stripped of the business context that makes it meaningful. The result is a familiar and costly pattern: pilots that cannot scale, slow integration of new data sources, duplicated engineering work and compliance risk when organizations cannot explain how an AI-driven decision was reached. Dremio helps eliminate that data fragmentation and integration friction. The acquisition will complement the SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud offerings to ensure seamless data integration across SAP and non-SAP data with high performance and low cost to accelerate AI-ready context and time-to-value for AI.

"Enterprise AI doesn't stall because the models aren't good enough; it stalls because the data isn't ready for AI agents," said Philipp Herzig, CTO, SAP SE. " Dremio eliminates that bottleneck. Combined with SAP Business Data Cloud, we can now take customers from raw, fragmented data to governed, AI-ready intelligence on a single open platform."

With Dremio, SAP Business Data Cloud will become an Apache Iceberg-native enterprise lakehouse that unifies SAP and non-SAP data to power agentic AI at enterprise scale. Apache Iceberg is the industry-standard open table format, and SAP Business Data Cloud will natively support it as its foundation. This means no data movement or format conversion will be necessary. SAP and non-SAP data can coexist on the same open foundation, with federated analytical reach across every enterprise data source, combined with SAP HANA Cloud's in-memory engine for real-time transactions and operational performance.

The Dremio lakehouse platform is set to vastly improve the economics of enterprise analytics. It is serverless and elastic, scaling up automatically when demand spikes and scaling back down when it subsides, meaning no fixed capacity to provision and no performance ceiling when it matters most.

With Dremio, SAP will deliver a universal, open catalog built on Apache Polaris and the open Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. It serves as both the discovery and semantic layer of SAP Business Data Cloud, giving every connected engine – SAP or non-SAP – a single point of access to unified business context: meaning, relationships, access rights and data lineage. This catalog will form the foundation of the SAP Knowledge Graph, embedding business relationships, organizational hierarchies, regulatory classifications and cross-system lineage as native properties.

Dremio has been a leading steward of open-source projects at the heart of its platform: Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris and Apache Arrow,– and SAP is fully committed to continuing to invest in and prioritize these contributions.

The transaction is expected to close in Q3 of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

Visit the SAP News Center. Get SAP news via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

About Dremio

Dremio is the Agentic Lakehouse: the only Iceberg-native data platform built for agents and managed by agents. Every knowledge worker and AI agent gets instant, governed access to enterprise data through any LLM or tool of their choice. Federated queries reach any source without ETL pipelines. An AI Semantic layer adds business context so every agent draws from the same source of truth. The lakehouse manages itself, running clustering, optimization, and compaction autonomously. The result: trusted insights that drive better business outcomes, without the infrastructure complexity or overhead.

A lead contributor to Apache Iceberg and co-creator of Apache Arrow and Apache Polaris. Trusted by Shell, TD Bank, Michelin, and thousands of organizations worldwide. https://www.dremio.com/

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

This document contains forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and outcomes to materially differ. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties may be found in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to the risk factors section of SAP's 2025 Annual Report on Form 20-F.

© 2026 SAP SE. All rights reserved.

SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.

Note to editors:

To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high resolution material for your media channels.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:

Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24

United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

Please consider our privacy policy. If you received this press release in your e-mail and you wish to unsubscribe to our mailing list please contact press@sap.com and write Unsubscribe in the subject line. 

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SOURCE SAP SE