SAP has officially acquired Prior Labs, an AI startup founded by Noah Hollmann, University of Freiburg professor Frank Hutter, and Samuel Müller. Hollmann left Boston Consulting Group to study medicine at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin in 2019, where he began experimenting with AI to improve medical research. The startup offers open source models that have been downloaded more than 4 million times, helping clients analyze data in spreadsheets for finances, inventory predictions, and supply chain issues. The cofounders were reportedly paid more than half a billion dollars in cash upfront, with SAP committing to pay more than $1.14 billion into Prior Labs over the next four years. This acquisition is the startup’s second influx of money, following a $9.6 million pre-seed raised in February 2025 from Balderton Capital and XTX Ventures. Prior Labs began as a research lab in 2024 and added experts like Yann LeCun and Bernhard Schölkopf to its board of advisors. Hollmann credits recruitment and commercialization for enabling the deal, attracting researchers from Apple, Google, and Goldman Sachs. Early clients include Oxford Cancer Analytics and Hitachi Rail, which used Prior’s TabPFN to predict railway defects. Prior Labs now aims to leverage SAP’s 400,000-plus client roster for more enterprise use cases.