# 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. Launch - Aug 2026 ### TabPFN-Rel takes Prior's foundation model from tables to databases Prior Labs open-sourced RelArena-alpha, TabPFN-Rel and RPI-alpha to make relational-machine-learning results comparable and usable on real databases. TabPFN-Rel automated the joins and feature synthesis that turn linked tables into a TabPFN-3 prediction task, ranking first among model submissions in the new benchmark. **TabPFN-Rel joins and aggregates linked database tables before making in-context predictions with TabPFN-3.** [Source](https://priorlabs.ai/blog-posts/introducing-relarena) Team - Jul 2026 ### Prior splits commercial and research leadership between co-CEOs Sauraj Gambhir became co-CEO for partnerships, growth, customer relationships, finance and operations, while Frank Hutter became co-CEO for research. The change formalised the founders' existing division of work as Prior Labs scales its commercial business and multi-year research programme inside SAP. **Frank Hutter and Sauraj Gambhir became co-CEOs; Noah Hollmann continues as CTO.** [Source](https://priorlabs.ai/blog-posts/co-ceo-structure) Acquisition - Jul 2026 ### SAP's €1B+ Prior Labs acquisition closes SAP completed its acquisition of Prior Labs 18 months after the Freiburg lab was founded. Prior Labs kept its brand, leadership, research agenda and open-model commitment, while SAP's €1B-plus four-year investment added the infrastructure and hiring runway to pursue long-term tabular-AI research. [Source](https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/927377561/prior-labs-acquisition-closed-backed-by-1b-to-scale-its-frontier-ai-lab-for-enterprise-data) Acquisition - Jul 2026 ### Germany clears SAP's acquisition of Prior Labs Germany's Federal Cartel Office cleared SAP's purchase of Prior Labs in its initial merger-control review. The decision removes the regulatory condition on SAP's plan to keep the Freiburg lab independent while investing more than €1B over four years in tabular foundation models. [Source](https://www.mlex.com/mlex/mergers-acquisitions/articles/2498289/sap-wins-german-approval-to-take-over-dremio-prior-labs) 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/)