SAP announced two acquisitions: AI research lab Prior Labs and data lakehouse platform Dremio. With more than €1 billion in investments, SAP is leading the way in AI for structured business data. Both deals still require regulatory approval.
Prior Labs specializes in Tabular Foundation Models (TFM). The company will continue to operate as an independent division after the acquisition. Over the next four years, SAP will invest more than €1 billion to develop the company into the world’s leading AI research lab for structured business data. Financial details regarding the acquisition price itself were not disclosed.
SAP previously launched Business Data Cloud, a data platform that combines SAP and non-SAP data as the foundation for AI applications. Prior Labs and Dremio each add new building blocks to their respective platforms.
Tabular Foundation Model: AI for Structured Data
TFM is fundamentally different from large language models. In SAP’s view, LLM is not well suited for making accurate predictions from structured business data due to its limited understanding of tables, numbers, and statistics. TFM is built for this type of data and can predict late payments, supplier risk, customer churn, and upsell opportunities.
SAP has already taken steps in this area. Earlier this year, the company announced SAP-RPT-1, a table-native foundation model for relational business data from systems such as SAP S/4HANA. This model supports in-context learning for prediction and classification without retraining.
Prior Labs is built on the same foundation, but has a strong position of its own. Its flagship product, TabPFN-2.6, ranks #1 in TFM’s TabArena benchmark. The model’s growth has been impressive, and in less than a year, TabPFN’s support has expanded from 10,000 rows to 10 million rows of data. This open source model currently boasts over 3 million downloads.
By combining Prior Labs and SAP-RPT-1, SAP aims to implement TFM through SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud. The agent AI layer Joule is responsible for coordinating this. Users can ask questions, select datasets, and run what-if scenarios through a conversational interface in plain language without requiring data science expertise. The model quickly adapts to new use cases without the need for separate model training.
“SAP recognized early on that the biggest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI was not in large-scale language models, but in AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” said Philipp Herzig, SAP CTO.
SAP Business Data Cloud Apache Iceberg native with Dremio
In addition to Prior Labs, SAP also acquired Dremio. It’s an open, serverless data lakehouse platform designed to accelerate analytics and AI workloads. While Prior Labs powers the model side, Dremio addresses data fragmentation.
Many enterprise AI projects fail not because of the model, but because of the underlying data. That data is fragmented, locked into a proprietary format, and lacks the business context that makes predictions meaningful. Dremio is specifically designed to remove these barriers.
Dremio focuses on the open source projects Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, and Apache Arrow. In April 2026, Dremio released Apache Iceberg V3 support featuring improved JSON support, change data capture, and schema evolution.
With this acquisition, SAP Business Data Cloud will become Apache Iceberg native. SAP and non-SAP data can now coexist on the same open infrastructure without data migration or format conversion. Dremio is serverless and automatically scales up during peak demand and scales down when the load decreases.
“Enterprise AI doesn’t stagnate because the models aren’t good enough. It stagnates because the data isn’t ready for the AI agents to use,” said Herzig.
Through Dremio, SAP is also building a universal open catalog based on Apache Polaris and Apache Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. This catalog serves as the basis for the SAP Knowledge Graph and incorporates business relationships, organizational structure, regulatory classification, and lineage between systems as native properties.
SAP expects to close both transactions in 2026. The Prior Labs transaction is expected to close in the second or third quarter of 2026. Dremio is expected to be completed in the third quarter. SAP confirms that Prior Labs’ open source strategy around TabPFN and Dremio’s contributions to Apache Iceberg, Polaris, and Arrow will continue.
