SAP has announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs, an 18-month-old company focused on tabular foundation models (TFMs), and plans to invest €1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years. Pending regulatory approval, the deal also includes a new API policy that restricts which AI agents can access SAP products — effectively blocking OpenClaw and other unauthorized agent technologies while authorizing Nvidia's NemoClaw.
What Prior Labs does
Prior Labs, cofounded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, specializes in TFMs — AI models designed to make predictions from data stored in tables and databases. This is a better fit for enterprise use cases than general-purpose language models, especially for SAP's core products in accounting, HR, procurement, and expense management, which rely heavily on structured data. The startup's open-source TabPFN model series has been downloaded over three million times.
SAP CTO Philipp Herzig stated that the company sees the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI as being built for structured data, not large language models. Prior Labs will operate as an independent unit within SAP to maintain research velocity, while SAP provides long-term investment and a path to productization via SAP AI Core, SAP Business Data Cloud, and the Joule agent layer.
The NemoClaw restriction
SAP's updated API policy explicitly prohibits AI agents from accessing its products through its API unless they use "SAP-endorsed architectures." This includes SAP's own Joule Agents (still in beta) and Nvidia's NemoClaw, which is built on Nvidia's Agent Toolkit. Nvidia announced in March that SAP's Joule supports this toolkit. The policy effectively blocks OpenClaw and any other agent technology not explicitly authorized.
This approach contrasts with Salesforce, which allows enterprises to choose their own agents, including OpenClaw, through its Headless 360 architecture.
Deal details
SAP declined to disclose the acquisition price, but sources told Pathfounders that it was an "almost all cash" deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the founders. Prior Labs had previously raised approximately $9.3 million in a pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital in February 2025.
Tradeoffs
For SAP, the acquisition is both a defensive and offensive move. The company has invested in generative AI companies including Anthropic, Aleph Alpha, and Cohere (which now intend to merge). It also developed its own relational pretrained transformer model, SAP-RPT-1. The Prior Labs acquisition provides a shortcut to TFMs that can