SAP double acquisition: Dremio + Prior Labs ($1.16B+ for agentic data layer)

Summary

SAP announced acquisitions of Dremio (agentic lakehouse — real-time analytics and agent access to non-SAP data) and Prior Labs (tabular data AI models, €1B investment over 4 years). SAP Business Data Cloud with Dremio becomes Apache Iceberg-native, unifying SAP and non-SAP data “to power agentic AI at enterprise scale.” Prior Labs will operate independently as a frontier AI lab for structured business data.

Implications

SAP is building the data layer that enterprise agents need. Agents can’t act on data they can’t see — Dremio makes non-SAP data visible through a lakehouse, and Prior Labs’ tabular foundation models predict business outcomes (churn, supplier risk, payment delays). This is the “context, not tokens” argument from Nate’s May 10 piece made concrete: the bottleneck isn’t model capability but data access and prediction quality. SAP controls the ERP layer for ~77% of the world’s transaction revenue. If their agentic data layer works, agents get enterprise-grade access to the actual data that drives business decisions. Combined with the $5.5B deployment company week, enterprise AI infrastructure is being built faster than enterprise AI adoption.