SAP Acquires Prior Labs for $1.16 Billion and Picks NemoClaw as Its Trusted AI Agent

SAP Acquires Prior Labs for $1.16 Billion and Picks NemoClaw as Its Trusted AI Agent

The SAP Prior Labs acquisition is one of the boldest moves European enterprise tech has seen in years. SAP announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed sum, with plans to invest €1 billion, roughly $1.16 billion into the business over the next four years. The goal is to build it into a frontier AI lab focused on structured data, the kind that powers the tables and databases sitting at the heart of enterprise operations.

Prior Labs was co-founded just 18 months ago by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, with a focus on tabular foundation models AI systems capable of making predictions directly from data stored in tables and databases. That makes it a natural fit for SAP, whose software suite covers accounting, HR, procurement, and expense management, all of it running on structured database systems.

The SAP Prior Labs acquisition is more than a product bet. Sources told Pathfounders the deal was structured as an “almost all cash” transaction, with well over half a billion dollars paid upfront to the startup’s founders. Prior Labs’ open source TabPFN model series has been downloaded over three million times, signaling real developer demand even before SAP’s billions enter the picture.

But SAP is not just spending its way forward. It is also drawing a firm line around who gets to operate inside its ecosystem. SAP has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent technology it has not explicitly authorized, according to The Information. The company’s API policy confirms it prohibits AI agents from accessing its products except through “SAP-endorsed architectures.”

That short list of approved agents includes SAP’s own Joule Agents platform, still in beta, and now Nvidia’s NemoClaw. Nvidia announced in March that SAP’s Joule supports the Nvidia Agent Toolkit, which serves as the foundation for NemoClaw, Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused agent offering. This means SAP customers who want to run third-party agents will be channeled toward NemoClaw as their primary option outside of SAP’s own tools. TechCrunch

The contrast with rival Salesforce is sharp. Salesforce is allowing enterprises to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw, through its new Headless 360 architecture, a much more open-door approach compared to SAP’s tightly controlled strategy.

SAP CTO Philipp Herzig stated 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.” With the SAP Prior Labs acquisition now underway pending regulatory approval, the company is putting over a billion dollars behind that convict.

SAP has committed to keeping Prior Labs operating as an independent unit to maintain research speed, while providing a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio, including SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud, and the Joule agentic layer. The open source versions of Prior Labs’ models will also be maintained under the arrangement.

Balderton Capital partner James Wise, whose firm led Prior Labs’ $9.3 million pre-seed round in early 2025, called the acquisition “one of Germany’s biggest ever venture outcomes.“

For SAP, the pressure is real. Its stock has taken a hit in 2026 partly tied to broader concerns about the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” reshaping the enterprise software landscape. The Prior Labs bet, paired with a hardline stance on agents, suggests the company is done waiting to see how AI shakes out.