By OpenAI COO’s own admission last February, ‘we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.
Porsche is closing three of its subsidiaries as it copes with falling sales and declining profits, the German automaker announced Friday.
The automaker’s battery subsidiary, Cellforce Group, is perhaps the highest-profile casualty. The division had already been through a “realignment” in August after Porsche dropped plans to make its own batteries, turning Cellforce into a research and development arm. Now, Porsche says it’s pursuing a “technology-open powertrain strategy” — corporate-speak that indicates the automaker will rely more heavily on other companies for its batteries.
Porsche eBike Performance, which made e-bike drive systems, and Cetitec, a networking software subsidiary that served both Porsche and the wider Volkswagen Group, will also be shut down.
More than 500 people, who are employed at the three subsidiaries, will lose their jobs.
“We must refocus on our core business,” Porsche CEO and Executive Chair Michael Leiters said in a statement. “This is the indispensable foundation for a successful strategic realignment. This forces us to make painful cuts — including our subsidiaries.”
It’s a message that Leiters, who became CEO early this year, first delivered in March when the company announced plans to realign its business. “We will comprehensively reposition Porsche, make the company leaner, faster and the products even more desirable,” he said at the time.
Since then, Porsche has extracted itself from several endeavors, including an agreement reached in April to sell its equity stakes in Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Group to a consortium led by New York-based investment firm HOF Capital.
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Porsche’s electrification efforts got off to a strong start with the Taycan in 2019, but the company soon ran into trouble developing follow-on EVs. The Macan Electric was delayed by nearly two years as software development within Volkswagen’s Cariad division lagged behind expectations.
The entire company has suffered declining sales in key markets, including North America, where sales fell 11%, and China, where deliveries were off 21% in the first quarter of this year. European sales were also down 18%, though they rose slightly in Germany.
Porsche has blamed EV adoption for its woes, though the company’s continued poor performance in China, where electric vehicles have claimed more than half the market, suggests that consumer acceptance of EVs may not be the root cause.
The closure of Cellforce captures the change of fortunes for Porsche’s EV program. The German automaker had originally started the subsidiary to develop and manufacture batteries that would distinguish its EVs from other companies.
“The battery cell is the combustion chamber of the future,” Oliver Blume said in 2022 when he chaired Porsche’s executive board.
After struggling to develop EVs in a timely manner, Porsche has shifted much of its new vehicle efforts to reviving some its internal combustion platforms, which were originally intended to constitute a minority of sales by 2030. The company is still planning to rollout new EVs though, and will soon sunset the gas-powered version of the Porsche Macan. Porsche is expected to bring an all-electric version of the Cayenne, and several variants, to market this year.
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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.
De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the Unive
By OpenAI COO’s own admission last February, ‘we have not yet really seen AI penetrate enterprise business processes.’ But for enterprise software giant SAP, whose stock has dropped significantly in 2026 in part from
the ‘SaaSpocalypse’, the issue is still front and center.
On Monday, the European heavyweight announced its intention to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs for an undisclosed amount. Pending regulatory approval, SAP plans to invest €1 billion (approximately $1.16 billion) into the business over the next four years to grow it into an AI lab focused on structured data — the tables and databases where enterprise information typically sits.
SAP declined to disclose how much it spent on the acquisition itself, but sources told Pathfounders that this was a healthy exit: an “almost all cash” deal, with well over half a billion dollars in cash up front for the startup’s founders — Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir.
The trio cofounded Prior Labs just 18 months ago with a focus on tabular foundation models (TFMs) — AI models that can make predictions from data that sits in tables and databases. This is potentially a better fit for enterprises than language models. It is certainly a better fit for SAP, whose widely used software products for accounting, HR, procurement and expense management rely on its database.
However, Germany’s most valuable company also seems be playing defense as the tech industry marches towards agentic AI. While it works to create its own AI lab, the company has blocked OpenClaw and any other agent tech that it has not explicitly authorized, The Information was first to spot.
In response to a request for comment, SAP’s press department referred TechCrunch’s to the company’s latest API policy, which does say that SAP “prohibits” AI agents from accessing its products through its API except for those that are “SAP-endorsed architectures.”
Authorized architectures of course include SAP’s own offering, Joule Agents, still in beta, which lets customers create their own agents. Nvidia also announced in March that SAP’s Joule supports Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, which is software for managing agents. This toolkit is the foundation for Nvidia’s enterprise-ready, security-focused OpenClaw competitor, NemoClaw. Hence SAP customers will be authorized to use NemoClaw agents.
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For a giant incumbent player like SAP, AI is both a threat and an opportunity. “It’s all about how quickly [we can] as SAP actually also embark [on] these technologies in our R&D portfolio to keep the relative economies of scale advantage,” CFO Dominik Asam told CNBC in January.
SAP hasn’t been sitting on its hands. The German company invested in generative AI companies that develop language models large and small: in 2023, it backed OpenAI rival Anthropic — as well as Aleph Alpha and Cohere, which now intend to merge to form “a global AI powerhouse.”
It had also developed SAP-RPT-1, a relational pretrained transformer model. “Early on, SAP recognized that the greatest untapped opportunity in enterprise AI wasn’t large language models; it was AI built for the structured data that runs the world’s businesses,” SAP CTO Philipp Herzig declared in a statement.
But Prior Labs’ acquisition is a significant shortcut in that direction. Its TabPFN model series has experienced a lot of traction among developers. In a blog post on the deal, the startup’s founders said that its open-source models have been downloaded over three million times.
In a press release, SAP promised that Prior Labs will maintain the open-source versions: “The lab will operate as an independent unit to ensure research velocity while SAP provides long-term investment and a direct path to productization across the SAP portfolio with SAP AI Core and SAP Business Data Cloud as well as the agentic layer with Joule.”
SAP and the startup headquartered in Freiburg, Germany, hope that this investment will
SAP bets $1.16B on 18-month-old German AI lab and says yes to NemoClaw TechCrunch
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