# Prior Labs — Foundation models for tabular and structured data.

Prior Labs builds foundation models for the structured data that runs businesses. Its open TabPFN models make accurate predictions on tables, spreadsheets, and databases in a single forward pass — in seconds, without task-specific training.

Founded

2024

Headquarters

Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Category

Foundational AI, Open Source, Enterprise, Developer Tools

Legal name

Prior Labs GmbH

## Highlights

Notable milestones from Prior Labs’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing.

Acquisition - May 2026

### SAP acquires Prior Labs, backing it with over €1B

Eighteen months after founding, SAP agreed to buy the lab — reportedly an ~$1.16B deal — and pledged to invest more than €1B over four years to scale it into a European frontier AI lab for structured data, with Prior Labs continuing to operate independently.

[Source](https://news.sap.com/2026/05/sap-to-acquire-prior-labs-establish-frontier-ai-lab-europe/)

Milestone - Dec 2025

### First tabular foundation model to reach 10M rows

A new "Scaling Mode" removed TabPFN's size ceiling, extending it to enterprise datasets of up to 10 million rows. By then the open model had passed 2.3M downloads and was in production at firms including Hitachi and major global banks.

[Source](https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/01/prior-labs-debuts-tabular-ai-foundation-model-scales-10-million-rows/)

Launch - Nov 2025

### TabPFN-2.5 scales 20× and matches tuned AutoML

The 2.5 release handled 20× more data cells than its predecessor — up to 50,000 rows and 2,000 features — matching the accuracy of heavily tuned AutoGluon and tree-based models while still running in a single forward pass.

[Source](https://priorlabs.ai/technical-reports/tabpfn-2-5-model-report)

Funding - Feb 2025

### €9M pre-seed led by Balderton

Balderton led a €9M ($9.3M) pre-seed, joined by XTX Ventures, SAP co-founder Hans-Werner Hector's Hector Foundation, and Atlantic Labs — plus angels including Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf, Black Forest Labs' Robin Rombach, and Silo AI's Peter Sarlin.

Round

Pre-Seed

Raised

$9.3M

Led by

Balderton Capital, XTX Ventures

[Source](https://fortune.com/2025/02/05/prior-labs-9-million-euro-preseed-funding-tabular-data-ai/)

Launch - Jan 2025

### TabPFN lands in Nature — 2.8 seconds beats 4 hours of tuning

Published in Nature, TabPFN is a transformer trained on millions of synthetic datasets that predicts on small tables in a single forward pass. In 2.8 seconds it outperformed an ensemble of the strongest baselines tuned for four hours — the first true foundation model for tabular data.

**How TabPFN works: pre-trained on millions of synthetic tables, then applied to any real dataset in one forward pass.**

[Figure: Hollmann et al., Nature (CC BY 4.0)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6)

[Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08328-6)

Team - Nov 2024

### Spun out of Freiburg by AutoML's most-cited researcher

Frank Hutter — the world's most-cited AutoML researcher — left academia with Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir to commercialise TabPFN, the tabular foundation model born in his lab at the University of Freiburg, with ELLIS/Max Planck director Bernhard Schölkopf among the founding advisors.

**Co-founders Sauraj Gambhir, Frank Hutter, and Noah Hollmann.**

[Photo: Prior Labs](https://www.balderton.com/news/prior-labs-raises-e9m-to-revolutionise-how-businesses-interact-with-their-tabular-data/)

[Source](https://www.balderton.com/news/prior-labs-raises-e9m-to-revolutionise-how-businesses-interact-with-their-tabular-data/)