In February of last year, OpenAI's COO acknowledged that "we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes." However, for enterprise software giant SAP—whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026, partly due to the so-called 'SaaSpocalypse'—this issue remains a top priority. On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its plans to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP intends to invest €1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years, aiming to transform it into an AI lab focused on structured data—the tables and databases where enterprise information typically resides.

SAP declined to disclose the exact amount spent on the acquisition itself, but sources informed Pathfounders that this was a notable exit: an "almost all cash" deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup's 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 capable of making predictions from data stored in tables and databases. This approach is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models, and certainly aligns more closely with SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement, and expense management rely heavily on its database.

However, Germany's most valuable company also appears to be playing defense as the tech industry advances toward agentic AI. While working to establish its own AI lab, SAP has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent technology it has not explicitly authorized, as first spotted by The Information. Authorized architectures naturally include SAP's own offering, Joule Agents—still in beta—which allows customers to create their own agents. Additionally, Nvidia announced in March that SAP's Joule supports Nvidia's Agent Toolkit, software designed for managing agents. This toolkit forms the foundation for Nvidia's enterprise-ready, security-focused competitor to OpenClaw, called NemoClaw. Consequently, SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents.

For a giant incumbent like SAP, AI represents both a threat and an opportunity. "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," CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January. SAP hasn't been idle. The German company invested in generative AI firms developing both large and small language models: in 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic, as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now intend to merge to form "a global AI powerhouse." SAP also developed SAP-RPT-1, a relational pretrained transformer model. "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 declared in a statement.

But the acquisition of Prior Labs represents a significant shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN model series has gained considerable traction among developers. In a blog post about the deal, the startup's founders noted that its open-source models have been downloaded over three million times. In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs will maintain the 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."

SAP and the startup, headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope this investment will lead to TFMs capable of extracting data from the tables where it resides, combining that with language, reasoning, and domain knowledge. More ambitiously, they hope that Prior Labs, with this "massive boost" from SAP, can become a new "globally-leading frontier AI lab for structured data—in Europe, in the open," founder and CEO Frank Hutter celebrated in a post on X. In February 2025, the startup had previously raised approximately $9.3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Balderton Capital—more than competitor Neuralk-AI, but significantly less than Fundamental, which emerged from stealth with a $255 million Series A in February. In a post on X, Balderton partner James Wise called Prior Labs' acquisition "one of Germany's biggest ever venture outcomes." As for SAP, its stock is currently trading slightly upward.

Meanwhile, SAP is being very strict about which agents it will allow into its ecosystem. This approach is wildly different from that of Salesforce, another incumbent caught in the SaaSpocalypse. Salesforce is allowing enterprises to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw if they wish, through its new Headless 360 architecture.