SAP aims to regain control of enterprise data with DREMIO and PRIOR LABS

SAP has sent a powerful strategic signal to the enterprise software market by announcing, almost simultaneously, the acquisitions of Dremio, a specialist in lakehouse architectures built on Apache Iceberg, and Prior Labs, a young German company developing AI models for tabular data. Above all, the German software group is seeking to regain control of the future enterprise data value chain at a time when artificial intelligence is reshaping the very architecture of business software.

The financial terms of the acquisitions have not been officially disclosed. However, according to several sources cited by Pathfinders and TechCrunch, the Prior Labs transaction reportedly represents an exit worth more than €425 million, paid primarily in cash, with over €255 million going immediately to founders Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir. SAP has also announced an additional €1 billion investment over four years to turn Prior Labs into a global research laboratory dedicated to AI for structured data.

For several years, a growing share of the value created around enterprise data has been shifting away from traditional ERP systems. Major cloud and analytics platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and Google Cloud have captured a significant proportion of the use cases associated with analytics, AI and advanced data processing. Under this model, ERP platforms risk gradually being relegated to the role of transactional systems feeding external platforms that have become far more strategic. This is precisely the scenario SAP is now attempting to avoid.

Founded in 2017, US company Dremio has established itself as one of the leading providers of open data architectures capable of unifying information scattered across multiple clouds, data lakes and analytics databases. Before its acquisition, the startup had raised approximately €306 million from investors including Sapphire Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cisco Investments and Adams Street Partners. Its most recent estimated valuation exceeded €850 million.

Its technology makes it possible to query, structure and govern large volumes of data through a unified SQL layer, while relying heavily on open-source standards, particularly Apache Iceberg. This is a central point because Iceberg is becoming to data architecture what Kubernetes became to cloud infrastructure: a standardised layer enabling interoperability between different environments. The format makes it possible to manage vast analytical datasets while preserving a detailed history of changes, fine-grained governance and greater data lineage.

The other acquisition is Prior Labs. Founded less than two years ago in Freiburg, the startup raised approximately €7.9 million in a pre-Seed round announced in February 2025. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from XTX Ventures, Atlantic Labs and Hector Foundation. Its business angels included Peter Sarlin, founder of Silo AI; Christopher Lynch of AtScale; Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk and Tessl; Edward Grefenstette of Google DeepMind; Robin Rombach of Black Forest Labs; Ashutosh Kulkarni of Elastic; Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face; and Steve Anavi, co-founder of Qonto.

The company develops AI models specialised in tabular data, meaning the information organised into rows and columns that forms the core of ERP systems. Its TabPFN-2.5 model is designed to generate predictions, detect anomalies and automate certain business analyses directly from large databases or spreadsheets.

This positioning differs markedly from that of large language models. Since the explosion of generative AI, the market has focused primarily on LLMs capable of generating text or interacting conversationally. Yet within companies, most critical data remains deeply structured, including accounting, supply chains, procurement, human resources, treasury operations, supplier management and inventory control.

SAP appears to believe that the next wave of value creation in enterprise AI will come less from conversational interfaces than from the ability to extract intelligence from these vast transactional databases. The group had already started moving in this direction with RPT-1, its Relational Pre-Trained Transformer launched last year. Acquiring Prior Labs now allows SAP to accelerate this strategy dramatically while bringing in a research team that is particularly well regarded in the field of tabular models.

But these acquisitions are also part of a much broader battle: the race to control AI agents.

Major software vendors now understand that traditional business application interfaces could gradually disappear, replaced by agents capable of interacting directly with information systems. In this model, whoever controls the orchestration layer for data, permissions and workflows could also control the enterprise’s future interface.

SAP is therefore seeking to prevent a third party, whether OpenAI, Anthropic or a new generation of agentic platforms, from capturing this strategic relationship.

The recent tightening of its API policy points in the same direction. SAP now prohibits certain unapproved AI agents from operating on its systems and favours architectures validated by the company, particularly those built around its own Joule agentic layer.

Ultimately, these acquisitions reflect a shared concern among incumbent software vendors: preventing AI from turning their products into invisible infrastructure feeding far more powerful external platforms. With Dremio and Prior Labs, SAP is attempting to rebuild a central position in the enterprise technology stack, no longer merely as an ERP vendor, but as a unified infrastructure for data, AI and, eventually, autonomous agents.