Eighteen months after a €9m pre-seed, the Freiburg-based pioneer of TabPFN is being acquired by SAP and will receive more than €1bn over four years. The terms are not disclosed; the strategic intent is unmistakable.

When Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir founded Prior Labs in early 2024, the AI world was paying attention to almost everything except the kind of data their company was built around. Language models were absorbing capital, attention, and graduate students.

Tables, the spreadsheets and structured records that actually run businesses, were not part of the AI conversation that was supposed to produce a frontier lab.…