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

By the OpenAI COO’s own admission last February, “we haven’t really seen AI seep into enterprise business processes yet.” But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has fallen significantly in 2026 in part because of the “SaaSpocalypse,” the issue is still front and center.

On Monday, the European heavyweight announced his intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an unknown amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest 1 billion euros (about $1.16 billion) in the business over the next four years to develop it into an artificial intelligence lab focused on structured data — the tables and databases where business information typically resides.

SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, but sources told Pathfounders that this was a healthy exit: an “almost all cash” deal, with more than half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir.

The trio co-founded Previous Workshops just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFM) — artificial intelligence models that can make predictions from data found in tables and databases. This is potentially better for business than for language models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, human resources, procurement and expense management are based on its database.

But Germany’s most valuable company also appears to be playing defensively as the tech industry moves toward artificial intelligence. While it works to build its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other proxy technology it hasn’t expressly authorized, The Information he was the first to spot.

In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred TechCrunch to the company department latest API policywhich says that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API, except for those that are “SAP-approved architectures.”

Authorized architectures naturally include SAP’s offering, Joule agentsstill in beta, which allows customers to create their own agents. Nvidia too was announced in March which supports SAP’s Joule Nvidia Dealer Toolkitwhich is software for managing agents. This toolkit is the foundation for OpenClaw’s enterprise-ready, security-focused competitor, Nvidia’s NemoClaw. SAP customers will therefore be authorized to use NemoClaw agents.

For a giant incumbent like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how fast [we can] as SAP also starts [on] these technologies in our R&D portfolio to maintain the relative advantage of economies of scale”, CFO Dominik Asam he told CNBC in January.

SAP has not sat on its hands. The German company has invested in prolific AI companies developing language models, large and small: In 2023, it backed OpenAI competitor Anthropic — as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now plan to merge to form “a global AI hub.”

It had also been developed SAP-RPT-1a relational pretrained transformer model. “Early on, SAP recognized that the biggest untapped opportunity in business AI wasn’t big language models, it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” said SAP CTO Philipp Herzig.

But the acquisition of Prior Labs is an important shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN series of models has gained a lot of traction among developers. In one blog post about the deal, the founders of the startup said that the open source models have been downloaded more than three million times.

In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs will maintain open source versions: “The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure the speed of research, while SAP provides long-term investment and an immediate path to productivity across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.”

SAP and the Freiburg, Germany-based startup hope this investment will lead to TFMs that can capture data in the tables where it lives, combine it with language, logic and domain knowledge.

What’s more, they hope Prior Labs, with this “massive push” from SAP, can become a new “world-leading frontier AI lab for structured data — in Europe, in the countryside,” celebrated founder and CEO Frank Hutter. post on X.

In February 2025, the startup had previously raised some $9.3 million in a pre-broadcast funding round led by Balderton Capital — more than rival Neuralk-AI, but far less than Fundamental, which emerged from stealth with a $255 million Series A in February.

In a post in XBalderton partner James Wise called the acquisition of Prior Labs “one of Germany’s biggest business results”. As for SAP, its stock is currently trading slightly higher.

Meanwhile, SAP is very strict about what agents it will allow into its ecosystem. This is a very different approach from Salesforce, another incumbent caught up in the SaaSpocalypse. It allows businesses to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw if they choose, with its new Headless 360 architecture.