SAP completed its acquisition of Prior Labs, the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models, and committed to investing more than $1.1B over the next four years to scale it into a globally leading frontier AI lab for structured business data.
Prior Labs, founded just 18 months ago, pioneered TFMs – AI models purpose-built for the rows-and-columns data that powers enterprise systems. The startup’s work complements SAP’s own SAP-RPT-1 model. Under the deal, Prior Labs will continue to operate as an independent entity within SAP while receiving the funding needed to expand its research team and infrastructure.
The acquisition signals a major enterprise AI play: instead of competing on general-purpose chatbots, SAP is betting on specialized AI that understands financial ledgers, supply chains, and inventory databases – the structured data that underpins the world’s businesses. TFMs represent a departure from the language-model race, focusing on the kind of data most valuable to corporate customers.
SAP announced the deal in May and received regulatory clearance in late June. The closing puts SAP in direct competition with other enterprise AI efforts from Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce in the race to make business data AI-native.
