SAP acquisitions of Dremio, Prior Labs target AI development

BREAKING -- Following closely on the heels of its March acquisition of master data management specialist Reltio, SAP on Monday revealed that it plans to acquire data lakehouse vendor Dremio and AI model developer Prior Labs to better enable AI development and management.

Financial terms of the purchases were not disclosed, and each remains subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing requirements. SAP's Dremio acquisition is expected to close during the third quarter of this year, while its purchase of Prior Labs is expected to close during second or third quarter of 2026.

As enterprise data management workloads evolve to become enablers of AI-powered insight generation and process automation, vendors such as SAP -- which provides data platform capabilities as part of its array of offerings beyond Enterprise Resource Planning -- are attempting to simplify AI development and management for their customers.

SAP's acquisition of Reltio, which SAP disclosed on March 27, adds master data management capabilities that enable users to unify their data to make it more easily accessible for AI and analytics workloads. The acquisition of Dremio, which provides a data lakehouse platform optimized for open source Apache Iceberg tables that make data interoperable between platforms that support the format, will similarly simplify access to data for enterprise workloads.

"With Dremio, we're able to add the modern lakehouse architecture. … We're super excited about this opportunity," Irfan Khan, president and chief product officer of SAP data and analytics, said on Monday during a virtual press conference.

With Dremio, we're able to add the modern lakehouse architecture. … We're super excited about this opportunity.

Purchasing Prior Labs, meanwhile, adds tabular foundation model capabilities that enable organizations to use data stored in tables to fuel predictive AI initiatives.

"Similar to large language models for unstructured data, we want to democratize the access for predictive AI, a market which is as large as the generative AI market," Philipp Herzig, SAP's chief technology officer, said during the press conference. "That is exactly where Prior Labs comes in."

SAP's acquisitions of Reltio, Dremio and Prior Labs are part of an ongoing consolidation trend as enterprises attempt to simplify complex AI pipelines and lower the high cost of AI development by reducing the number of tools and vendors needed to create AI workflows.

Last year, data integration specialist Informatica was acquired by Salesforce in a deal that ultimately closed in November, data integration vendor Fivetran and data transformation specialist DBT Labs agreed to merge in November, and IBM acquired streaming data vendor Confluent in December.

Reporting for this story is in progress and will be updated.

Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget and a journalist with more than three decades of experience. He covers analytics and data management.