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

By OpenAI COO Special admission Last February, “We have yet to really see AI penetrate enterprise business processes.” But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has fallen dramatically in 2026, in part From “SaaSpocalypse”The issue is still front and center.

The European heavyweight announced his intention on Monday Acquisition of German AI startup Prior Labs For an undisclosed sum. 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 laboratory focused on structured data — the tables and databases where enterprise information typically resides.

SAP declined to disclose the amount it spent on the acquisition itself, however Sources told Pathfounders That this was a healthy exit: an “almost all-cash” deal, with over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Holman, and Suraj Gambhir.

The trio co-founded Previous laboratories Just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular basis models (TFMs) – AI models that can make predictions from data in tables and databases. This is probably more relevant to organizations than linguistic models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, human resources, purchasing and expense management rely on its database.

However, Germany’s most valuable company appears to be playing a defensive role as the tech industry moves toward agentic AI. As it works to build its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other proxy technology it has not explicitly allowed. Information He was the first to discover.

In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred the TechCrunch report to the company Latest API policywhich states that SAP “prevents” AI agents from accessing its products through its API except for those considered “SAP approved builds.”

Supported architectures include of course SAP’s own offerings, Jules agentsstill in beta, which allows customers to create their own agents. Nvidia too Announce in March powered by SAP’s Joule Nvidia Proxy Toolkitwhich is an agent management software. This toolset is the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. SAP customers will then be allowed to use NemoClaw agents.

For an existing giant like SAP, AI represents both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how quickly (we) can SAP actually start (using) these technologies in our R&D portfolio to maintain the advantage of relative economies of scale,” CFO Dominic Assam He told CNBC In January.

SAP was not sitting on its hands. German company Invested in generative artificial intelligence companies Which develops large and small language models: In 2023, OpenAI backed rival Anthropic – as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which are now Intend to merge To form a “global AI powerhouse.”

It has also evolved SAP-RPT-1,A pre-trained relational transformer model. “Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI was not big language models; it was AI designed for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philip Herzig announced in a statement.

But the Prior Labs acquisition is an important shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN template series has seen a lot of traction among developers. In a Blog post Regarding the deal, the startup’s founders said that its open source models have been downloaded more than three million times.

In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs would keep the releases open source: “The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research speed while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to production across the SAP portfolio using SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agent layer with Joule.”

SAP and the startup, which is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope this investment will lead to TFM devices capable of collecting data in the tables in which it resides, and combining it with language, reasoning, and domain knowledge.

What’s more, they hope that with this “massive push” from SAP, Prior Labs will become “the world’s leading AI lab for structured data — in Europe, openly,” as founder and CEO Frank Hütter celebrated in a press conference. Share on X.

In February 2025, the startup had previously raised some funds $9.3 million in pre-seed funding round Led by Balderton Capital – more than a competitor Newark-AIbut much less than essentialwhich came out of stealth with a $255 million Series A in February.

In a job On XBalderton partner James Wise described the Prior Labs acquisition as “one of the largest venture outcomes ever in Germany.” As for SAP, its stock is currently trading slightly higher.

At the same time, SAP has become very strict about which agents it will allow into its ecosystem. This is a very different approach than Salesforce, which is another approach The incumbent was arrested on SaaSpocalypse. It allows organizations to choose their agents, including OpenClaw if they wish, With its new 360 degree headless architecture.