Scale, data and ecosystem: Inside TechWolf’s acquisition agreement with SAP

Two years after participating in TechWolf’s $42.75 million Series B funding round, SAP has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Belgian AI work intelligence platform.

Jeroen Van Hautte, Co-Founder & CTO, tells UNLEASH that as TechWolf was having Series C conversations, the acquisition option was put on the table – and it just made sense. “Luckily, we had the chance to be deliberate about this next chapter, and we chose to team up with SAP,” he says.

Since it was founded in 2017, TechWolf has been “obsessed with understanding skills and understanding work.” As AI completely disrupts skills and work, “the problem to solve out there is so much bigger than we, as a standalone scale-up, could address” alone, notes Van Hautte.

One of TechWolf’s biggest bottlenecks as a standalone company was access to data from the systems that work actually runs on. SAP, he says, is unique because it doesn’t just have a big HR business; it is also “one of the key enterprise systems upon which work actually happens.”

From an SAP perspective, this acquisition will turn TechWolf into the intelligent core of the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio. Once the deal closes – this is expected for Q4 2026 – the focus will be on TechWolf and SAP unifying skills and work data to inform HR and business decision-making.

The plan is for TechWolf to exist as an independent entity – the company has committed to serve all of its customers, whether they are SAP clients or not, and will be “investing more, not less,” in everything from its integration with LLMs like Copilot and Claude to supporting the systems customers run on today, according to Van Hautte.

What HR buyers need to know & do following the SAP-TechWolf acquisition

Thomas Otter, a former SAP SuccessFactors Global VP turned investor (he’s backed TechWolf as General Partner at Acadian Ventures), argues the deal is more than an HCM play. It “immediately makes SAP more competitive.”

It gives buyers a lot of intelligence into “how the enterprise software stack will be rebuilt to manage and empower both humans and agents”, while also building on existing acquisitions, notably SmartRecruiters and Signavio.

Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE, shared in a press release that TechWolf is a “grounding layer for agent queries regarding work and skills planning and talent management.”

This “perfectly matches our strategy. It makes token usage more efficient, lowers the cost of deploying workforce agents and will make Joule more intelligent in AI-driven HR scenarios such as skills-based hiring, workforce planning and role redesign.”

Writing about the acquisition on LinkedIn, Stacia Garr, Co-Founder of RedThread Research, noted this deal means SAP has bought the “Switzerland of the skills world.”

“Once the deal closes, that neutrality will belong to one HCM, and every other vendor and buyer in this market has to decide what that means for them,” she added.

Otter noted that this deal provides SAP with “a meaningful product to sell into customers that have a mix of SAP ERP and other HCM vendors, such as Workday, UKG, and Dayforce.”

Garr recommended that buyers get into “specifics now” about the future of TechWolf’s platform; this is especially important for non-SAP customers.

Van Hautte acknowledges customer conversations are still in progress: “Of course customers have questions, and we are working with them to answer those,” he says. What matters most to them is TechWolf’s “continuing commitment to being open.”

The message to customers has been: “We will amplify the things that make TechWolf great today.”

With the deal yet to close, Van Hautte is careful about forward-looking statements. But he is clear that work transformation needs to be AI-native, agentic and grounded in how an organization actually runs.

Notable to HR buyers is that TechWolf is also using the acquisition to follow through on a commitment from its Series B to launch a Foundation.

Van Hautte shares that TechWolf will contribute 3% of the equity value of the SAP sale to the charity and projects linked with the company’s purpose to “help all people flourish at work.”