SAP to Acquire Dremio, Building Iceberg‑Native Lakehouse to Power Agentic AI at Enterprise Scale

SAP SE has announced plans to acquire Dremio, a leading open-source data lakehouse platform, to strengthen its Business Data Cloud and accelerate agentic AI capabilities. The deal, expected to close in Q3 2026 pending regulatory approval, will make SAP’s platform Apache Iceberg-native, enabling seamless integration of SAP and non-SAP data.

Dremio is a U.S.-based data lakehouse company headquartered in Mountain View, California, founded in 2015 by Tomer Shiran and Jacques Nadeau. It has raised over $420 million from major investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.

Dremio positions itself as the Agentic Lakehouse, an Apache Iceberg-native data platform designed for AI agents and enterprise analytics. It enables federated queries across multiple data sources without ETL pipelines, providing a unified semantic layer that adds business context for AI and human users alike.  

Key Highlights of the Acquisition

• Acquirer: SAP SE (NYSE: SAP)
• Target: Dremio, an open, high-performance data lakehouse platform
• Announcement Date: May 4, 2026
• Closing Timeline: Expected Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approval
• Financial Terms: Not disclosed
• Strategic Goal: Enhance SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP HANA Cloud to unify SAP and non-SAP data for real-time analytics and AI workloads

Why SAP is Acquiring Dremio

• Data Fragmentation Challenge: Many enterprise AI projects fail due to fragmented, proprietary data formats lacking business context.
• Dremio’s Solution: Provides an Apache Iceberg-native lakehouse that eliminates data movement and format conversion.
• Agentic AI Enablement: Accelerates AI-ready context, reducing integration friction and compliance risks.
• Serverless Architecture: Elastic scaling improves economics of enterprise analytics by removing fixed capacity requirements.

SAP’s Broader AI Strategy

• Alongside Dremio, SAP is also acquiring Prior Labs, a pioneer in Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs).
• SAP is committing over €1 billion to scale Prior Labs globally.
• The combination of Dremio’s open lakehouse and Prior Labs’ TFMs positions SAP to deliver enterprise-scale agentic AI solutions.

Industry Impact

• Open-Source Commitment: SAP will continue investing in Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris, and Apache Arrow.
• Competitive Landscape: Dremio differentiates itself from SAP’s existing partners like Snowflake and Databricks.
• Customer Base: Dremio is trusted by Shell, TD Bank, and Michelin.

Summary

SAP’s acquisition of Dremio marks a strategic leap in enterprise AI, addressing the critical bottleneck of fragmented data. By embedding Dremio’s Iceberg-native lakehouse into SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP aims to deliver governed, AI-ready intelligence at scale, while reinforcing its commitment to open-source innovation.