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

As OpenAI COO himself admitted last February: “We haven’t really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes yet.” But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose shares are down significantly in 2026 partly due to the ‘SaaSpocalypse’, the issue is still front and center.

The European heavyweight announced his intention on Monday acquisition of the 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 company over the next four years to grow it into an AI lab focused on structured data – the tables and databases that typically house business information.

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

The trio is co-founder Previous laboratories just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular basis models (TFMs) – AI models that can make predictions based on data contained in tables and databases. This potentially suits companies better than language models. It’s certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used accounting, HR, purchasing and expense management software products depend on the database.

However, Germany’s most valuable company also appears to be on the defensive as the tech industry moves towards agentic AI. Although the company is in the process of creating its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent technology that it has not explicitly authorized. The information was the first to see it.

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

Authorized architectures naturally include SAP’s own offerings, Joule agentsstill in beta, which allows customers to create their own agents. Nvidia too announced in March that supports SAP’s Joule Nvidia’s AgentToolkitagent management software. This toolkit forms the basis for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Therefore, SAP customers are authorized to use NemoClaw agents.

For a large established player like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how fast [we can] as SAP is actually getting on board too [on] these technologies in our R&D portfolio to maintain relative economies of scale,” said CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January.

SAP has not been sitting idle. The German company invested in generative AI companies developing large and small language models: in 2023 it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic – as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now plan to merge to form ‘a global AI powerhouse’.

It had also developed SAP-RPT-1a relational pre-trained 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 powers the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig said in a statement.

But the Prior Labs acquisition is an important shortcut in that direction. The TabPFN model series has received a lot of attention among developers. In one blog post About the deal, the startup’s founders said the open source models have been downloaded more than 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 investments 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 that can collect data in the tables where they reside and combine it with language, reasoning and domain knowledge.

What’s more, they hope that with this “huge boost” from SAP, Prior Labs can become a new “globally leading AI lab for structured data – in Europe, in the open air,” founder and CEO Frank Hutter celebrated in a message on X.

The startup had previously raised some money in February 2025 $9.3 million in a pre-seed financing round led by Balderton Capital – more than rival Neuralk-AI, but far less than Fundamental, which emerged from stealth in February with a $255 million Series A.

In a message on XBalderton partner James Wise called the acquisition of Prior Labs “one of Germany’s greatest corporate achievements ever.” As for SAP, its shares are currently trading slightly higher.

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