In June 2024, SAP, Workday and ServiceNow all put money into the same Belgian startup.
On Tuesday, SAP agreed to acquire that startup outright. The price wasn’t disclosed, and SAP expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter, pending regulatory approval.
TechWolf reads the systems where your people work. From that it infers which skills they have and which tasks fill their jobs. Reuters reported the deal gives SAP a view of its customers’ workforces that its own HR software doesn’t have.
I think this is good news for SAP. SAP is assembling an HR data and AI stack through acquisition, and TechWolf is the skills and work layer it was missing. SmartRecruiters covers hiring and Signavio covers process, and SAP’s data deals this year (Reltio, Dremio and Prior Labs) suggest the pattern runs wider than HR alone.
SAP Is Framing TechWolf as Infrastructure for Agents
Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite, said TechWolf’s context graph would ground agent queries. He said it would make token usage more efficient and cut the cost of deploying workforce agents. It would also make Joule smarter at HR work like skills-based hiring and role redesign. SAP’s own blog post on the deal adds continuous workforce planning built on the same data.
SAP’s current plans keep TechWolf independent under CEO Andreas De Neve in Ghent. The platform stays available to non-SAP customers.
SAP said the two companies already share customers. TechWolf says it’s the largest acquisition of a venture-backed software company in Belgian history. Proof that you can build outside of traditional tech hubs and still hit it big.
TechWolf Built Its Business Inside Everyone Else’s Software
TechWolf was founded in 2018 by De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte and Mikaël Wornoo, who met studying computer science at Ghent University and Cambridge. It sells skills intelligence, work intelligence that gets down to the task level, and labor market data. TechWolf says it scores tasks for automation using the Stanford Human Agency Scale. It plugs into Workday’s Skills Cloud, SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM and Visier, so your employees don’t have to log into another tool.
Josh Bersin called it the “Switzerland” of skills technology when it raised its $42.75 million Series B, led by Felix Capital.
U.S. ARR grew from $1 million to $15 million in 18 months, De Neve said in his letter to customers. TechWolf still couldn’t keep up with demand.
SAP’s Recent Deals Look Better Orchestrated Than SuccessFactors Did
When SAP bought SuccessFactors in 2011, it paid about $3.4 billion, almost 10 times revenue according to Bersin. He noted that SAP’s launch materials hardly mentioned integrating SuccessFactors with the talent systems SAP already owned. He told customers to wait and see what SAP planned for integration and support. A customer of Plateau, which SuccessFactors had bought, told him SuccessFactors had stopped supporting one of its critical products.
SAP picked up Litmos in the Callidus deal, then sold it in 2022 to Francisco Partners because it overlapped with SuccessFactors Learning. In 2021 it bought only the intellectual property of SwoopTalent to build a continuously updated view of skills.
The SmartRecruiters deal went differently. SAP announced the deal in August 2025 and closed it on September 11. A native SuccessFactors integration shipped in March 2026, and SAP told existing Recruiting customers they won’t have to migrate.
SAP bought Reltio in March and announced Dremio and Prior Labs in May. It says Prior Labs will operate independently with €1 billion of SAP investment over four years.
Thomas Otter, a former SAP product leader, says SAP has significantly improved at post-merger integration and that he has the scars to compare. He’s also now a venture investor at Acadian, an early TechWolf backer, so he has a stake in the outcome. The SmartRecruiters timeline points the same direction, though.
The Deal Makes Sense for SAP, but TechWolf’s Independence Is Less Certain
TechWolf already connects to SuccessFactors through bidirectional integrations that leave SuccessFactors as the system of record, and De Neve wrote that most evidence of how work gets done sits in operational systems, which many of the world’s largest companies run on SAP.
SAP’s announcement calls TechWolf an intelligent core of SuccessFactors and says the two companies will unify skills and work data after close. Yet Workday and ServiceNow, both Series B investors, have deployed TechWolf internally, according to Otter. TechWolf’s site credits Workday with a 15% faster time-to-hire.
SmartRecruiters is the closest precedent. It’s still sold standalone, even though SAP’s own product page says it replaces the legacy SuccessFactors Recruiting module. I’d argue a product can stay available to everyone and still become the default inside SuccessFactors, and the roadmap tends to follow the default. TechWolf also feeds SAP’s Talent Intelligence Hub, the kind of overlap that got Litmos sold.
SAP has a reason to keep TechWolf neutral, I’d argue. De Neve said many customers use it inside agents like ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, and if the context graph only read SAP systems, it would be a much smaller asset than the one SAP just bought. I don’t know if that reason still wins in year three, when the roadmap is built around SuccessFactors.
De Neve’s letter also says co-founder Mikaël Wornoo is leaving. CTO Jeroen Van Hautte is relocating to San Francisco.
What to Watch If You Don’t Run SuccessFactors
SAP’s own post on the deal says both companies operate independently until it closes and that the integrated product roadmap gets defined afterward.
- Connector cadence. Check if the Workday and Oracle integrations you rely on keep getting updates at the pace they do now.
- Roadmap language. If SAP publishes the integrated roadmap, read how it describes TechWolf’s plans for non-SAP systems and compare that to the SmartRecruiters language.
- Contract terms. Ask your TechWolf rep now how your agreement handles a change of control, and if pricing for non-SAP customers is locked for any period.
- Data use. Ask whether your workforce data feeds the unified skills and work dataset SAP describes, and what rules apply to non-SAP customers.
- Leadership tenure. Check if De Neve and the rest of the executive team are still in place a year after closing.
I think this is a good deal for SAP, and likely a better-run one than SuccessFactors was in 2011. TechWolf fills a gap in the HR suite, and SmartRecruiters and Prior Labs show SAP can buy a company without trying to fold it in on day one.
SAP says TechWolf stays independent, but it also plans to make it a core piece of SuccessFactors. What that means for Workday and Oracle customers long-term isn’t as clear. That’s less permission to panic and more just to be aware of what is going on.