SAP has agreed to acquire TechWolf, a Ghent-based company whose AI builds a running map of the work employees do and the skills they have. The two companies announced the agreement on October 6, 2026.
The price was not disclosed. TechWolf described the deal as the largest acquisition of a venture-backed software company in Belgian history. It is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval, and the companies will operate separately until then. J.P. Morgan acted as TechWolf's exclusive financial adviser.
SAP said that, subject to closing and required consultation, TechWolf will stay an independent entity headquartered in Ghent and led by co-founder and chief executive Andreas De Neve. Its platform will remain available to companies that do not use SAP software.
What TechWolf built
TechWolf connects to the HR and business systems a company already runs and builds what it calls a context graph for work. The model has three layers: the individual tasks inside each job, the skills employees hold and use, and the external labour market. Customers compare that picture with their strategy to decide where to hire, retrain or move people.
The software is meant to sit alongside existing tools, including SAP SuccessFactors and rival HR systems, and to feed AI assistants and agents. TechWolf says its open-source models have been downloaded more than two million times, and it holds ISO/IEC 42001 and ISO/IEC 27001 certifications, with data residency in the EU and the US.
Named customers include HSBC, Atlas Copco Group, GSK, Ericsson, AMD, MetLife, PayPal and Booking.com. The company employs more than 120 people, according to Tech.eu, and has offices in London and New York in addition to Ghent, with San Francisco also listed in SAP's announcement.
“TechWolf's proprietary context graph for skills and work provides an excellent grounding layer for agent queries”
Why SAP is buying
SAP said TechWolf will become an intelligent core of its SuccessFactors HR suite, supporting skills mapping, workforce planning and organisational redesign. The deal brings TechWolf's context graph, its AI models and its applied research team into SAP, and the two plan to develop new workforce and skills products together after closing.
Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite, framed the purchase around AI agents. He said TechWolf's graph gives agent queries a grounding layer, which in his words makes token usage more efficient and lowers the cost of deploying workforce agents. Coverage by AI Weekly and The Next Web said the technology will also feed Joule, SAP's AI assistant.
De Neve said organisations everywhere are trying to work out how AI is changing work, and that TechWolf had spent eight years building the evidence layer to answer that question.
The founders and the funding
TechWolf was founded in 2018 by Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte and Mikaël Wornoo. It raised a €10 million (about $10.5 million) Series A in 2022 led by Stride.VC, according to a deal notice from law firm Jones Day.
In June 2024 it raised a $42.75 million Series B led by London-based Felix Capital. SAP, ServiceNow and Workday took part, alongside Notion Capital, Acadian Ventures, Fortino Capital Partners, SemperVirens and Harry Stebbings' 20VC, as well as AI researchers from DeepMind and Meta. Tech.eu puts TechWolf's total funding at more than $50 million.
SAP was therefore already a shareholder when it agreed to buy the company, as were two of its main rivals in HR software, ServiceNow and Workday.
SAP's run of AI deals
TechWolf is the latest in a series of AI and data acquisitions by SAP in 2026. According to The Next Web, SAP agreed to buy data management company Reltio in March and added Dremio and Prior Labs in May, committing more than €1 billion to Prior Labs over four years.
For the Belgian startup scene, the deal is a rare large exit for a Ghent software company, and one whose founders kept the headquarters, and on SAP's current plans the company itself, in the city.
