SAP announced on Tuesday that it will acquire TechWolf, a Belgian artificial intelligence company specializing in mapping employee work activities and skill usage. The acquisition aims to integrate TechWolf's data into the HR agents powering SAP SuccessFactors, with the goal of lowering operational costs and improving agent performance. The deal was unveiled at SAP's Connect conference in Las Vegas, with closure expected in the fourth quarter pending regulatory approval. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The two organizations had already maintained a partnership prior to this acquisition announcement. Going forward, TechWolf will operate as a standalone entity, with co-founder Andreas De Neve continuing in his role as chief executive officer.
TechWolf serves a roster of major enterprises including Booking.com, HSBC, MetLife, PayPal, AMD, Ericsson, and GSK. According to Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite, "TechWolf's proprietary context graph for skills and work provides an excellent grounding layer for agent queries regarding work and skills planning and talent management." Swaminathan further noted that the technology "makes token usage more efficient" to help reduce the expense of operating HR agents, which will enhance Joule's capabilities in areas such as skills-based hiring and role redesign.
Token efficiency has become a focal point for enterprise software vendors integrating generative AI. Atlassian made comparable claims about its Teamwork Graph in May, reporting that agents equipped with access to its context consumed 48 percent fewer tokens. The TechWolf acquisition aligns with SAP's broader thesis presented at Sapphire in May, positioning enterprise AI primarily as a context challenge. TechWolf is expected to become integral to the SuccessFactors ecosystem, supplying data to applications focused on employee skills mapping, workforce headcount planning, and organizational restructuring.
SAP also launched a Workforce Planning Assistant at Connect this week, which will be made available to early adopters during the current quarter.
How TechWolf works
Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte, and Mikaël Wornoo established TechWolf in Ghent in 2018. The platform integrates with existing HR systems and other business applications to automatically identify skills based on actual job performance rather than relying on employee self-reporting.
TechWolf describes its output as a "context graph for work," which operates across three interconnected layers: individual tasks comprising each role, the skills employees deploy, the broader external labor market, and alignment with organizational strategy.
SAP participated as an investor in TechWolf's $42.75 million Series B funding round in 2024, which was led by Felix Capital. The round also included ServiceNow and Workday, both competitors to SAP in the HR software market. TechWolf's inferred skills data already flows into SuccessFactors modules including the Talent Intelligence Hub, Recruiting, and Learning, with joint customers reporting measurable benefits from the integration.
In the developer community, TechWolf is recognized for publishing open models on Hugging Face. Its JobBERT models map job titles and descriptions into a unified vector space for job matching, with the current version supporting English, Spanish, German, and Chinese. The company's datasets have proven particularly popular, frequently accumulating millions of downloads.
De Neve stated in the announcement, "Organizations everywhere are trying to figure out how AI is reshaping work, and what their workforce needs to look like because of it." Combined with Reltio, which SAP acquired earlier this year, Joule's agents will gain a unified perspective of customers, suppliers, and products. TechWolf could provide a similarly integrated view of an organization's workforce.