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

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SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, but sources told Pathfounders that this was a healthy exit: an “almost all cash” deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir. The trio co-founded Prior Labs just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFMs) — AI models that can make predictions from data that sits in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models.

It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement and expense management rely on its database. However, Germany’s most valuable company also seems be playing defense as the tech industry marches toward agentic AI. While it works to create its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent tech that it has not explicitly authorized, The Information was first to spot.

In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred TechCrunch to the company’s latest API policy, which does say that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API except for those that are “SAP-endorsed architectures.” Authorized architectures of course include SAP’s own offering, Joule Agents, still in beta, which lets customers create their own agents. Nvidia also announced in March that SAP’s Joule supports Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which is software for managing agents. This toolkit is the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused method for deploying OpenClaw, NemoClaw.

Hence SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents. var playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7d3a428a7d7 = jwplayer( "jwplayer_6a7d3a428a7d7" ); playerInstance_jwplayer_6a7d3a428a7d7.setup(); For a giant incumbent player like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. SAP hasn’t been sitting on its hands. The German company invested in generative AI companies that develop language models large and small: In 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic — as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now intend to merge to form “a global AI powerhouse.” It had also developed SAP-RPT-1, a relational pretrained transformer model.

But Prior Labs’ acquisition is a significant shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN model series has experienced a lot of traction among developers. In a blog post on the deal, the startup’s founders said that its open source models have been downloaded over three million times.