SAP buys Ghent AI company TechWolf, price undisclosed

On 6 October SAP and TechWolf said they had signed an agreement. The deal is meant to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, if regulators and the usual conditions allow. The terms were not disclosed.

TechWolf reads HR and business systems a customer already has. It builds a picture on three levels: the tasks inside a job, the skills people use, and the labour market outside the company. SAP wants that picture inside SuccessFactors, its HR software, including for its own assistant Joule. Customers named in the release include HSBC, Atlas Copco, GSK, Ericsson and Booking.com.

After closing, SAP's plan is that TechWolf remains a separate company, keeps its name, and stays in Ghent under CEO Andreas De Neve, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco. The product should stay available to customers who do not use SAP.

De Neve says the founders, the staff and the investors will give 3 percent of the sale value to a new TechWolf Foundation. He also calls it Belgium's largest payout to employees in a deal of this kind. Neither claim can be checked from the outside, because the price is secret.

VRT reports that students from Ghent University founded the company in 2018: Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte and Mikaël Wornoo. PMV, the investment company of the Flemish government, put money in from 2020. Later rounds raised 10 million euros in 2022 and 40 million in 2024, and SAP was already an investor in that last round. Revenue in the year to January 2026 was 8.68 million euros. Wornoo is leaving.

This sits next to what AI is already doing to jobs and how widely Flemish companies use AI. The buyer is not a lab. It is the software that already runs HR at a lot of large employers.

The sensitive part is not the sale. It is the data the product is built to infer: a running picture of each person's skills, drawn from systems at work, which employees can check. SAP's product chief says that picture should make workforce agents cheaper and better at hiring, planning and redesigning roles.

TechWolf says it offers data storage in the EU and certifications, including ISO/IEC 42001, aimed at the EU AI Act. Whether a skills model inside SAP counts as a high-risk system for employment is not something either company answers in the announcement. See where the AI Act actually stands.

There is no price, so "the largest in Belgian history" is the company's sentence, not a figure anyone else has confirmed. VRT says De Tijd wrote of a deal in the hundreds of millions of euros. I have not read that piece.

SAP notes that its press release was drafted with the help of AI and then reviewed by editors. I am treating the release as the company's account, not as an independent article.