SAP has agreed to acquire Ghent-based AI startup TechWolf, which has grown globally with various rounds of VC backing.
While the deal terms have not been disclosed and are still subject to regulatory approval, Acadian Ventures’ general partner Thomas Otter reveals SAP acquiring TechWolf would be the largest acquisition of a venture-backed company in Belgian history and the country’s largest employee liquidity event to date. It’s also Acadian’s second portfolio company to be acquired by SAP (SmartRecruiters being the first), which he adds further vindicates the investment thesis for “the new architecture of work”.
“At first glance this seems like a straightforward human capital management play, but it is a strong signal of how the enterprise software stack will be rebuilt to manage and empower both humans and agents,” explains Thomas, who has been following TechWolf’s journey since shortly after its inception in 2018, when the trio of 22-year-old engineering students set out to solve what the industry widely regarded as an “intractable, wicked problem” after winning a university hackathon.
Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte and Mikaël Wornoo
Initially, Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte and Mikaël Wornoo wanted to build an AI model to predict whether workers could transition from oil rigs to offshore wind turbines by analysing transferable skills. However, as they began working with early Belgian clients, the founders stumbled onto a structural flaw across the entire enterprise stack: despite many established vendors and startups applying machine learning (ML) to the challenges of skills matching, they relied on employee self-assessments that were filled in once, never updated and only 40 percent aspirational.
Additionally, Thomas observes that most vendors failed because they underestimated the complexity of the ML and natural language processing (NLP) requirements. “This is heavy stuff,” he remarks, listing some of the mistakes they make:
- Coming at it from a specific silo (learning, recruitment, internal mobility);
- Working with limited data sources;
- Focusing inwardly on the data in their own application;
- Not thinking of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and privacy early enough; or
- Lacking a coherent onboarding process and requiring long implementation cycles.
The precise context of what people know and can do was missing.
So, Andreas, Jeroen and Mikaël pivoted and instead built an AI infrastructure layer that infers what people can actually do from the work they are already doing, then feeds that data into the HR systems companies already run.
TechWolf welcomes the VC “circus”
Thomas introduced the three founders to Acadian Ventures in June 2020 (ironically, before he had joined Acadian). Although they weren’t fundraising yet, the VC felt they had a lot to offer the startup – opening doors across customers, partners, investors and other strategic relationships TechWolf need as they scale.
“We liked that the founders were obsessed with the plumbing rather than the paint, which is rarer in HR tech than you’d think,” Thomas shares as the key reason for their early support.
He explains that one of the three fundamental tenets of Acadian’s investment approach is to ask the founders what they believe that others don’t. “While everyone else is out there building functionality, TechWolf focuses on the singular challenge of discovering, deriving, categorising, pruning, inferring, scrubbing, polishing, and curating skills data,” he stresses.
The other two tenets come down to whether the founders really want to build a fund-returning business and whether they are a talent magnet, which Thomas adds has been evident in TechWolf from the first day he met them. “They have already attracted top employees, customers and investors.”
Acadian made the partnership official in 2022 when TechWolf launched its €5 million Series A funding round, joining other participants, Fortino Capital, PMV, Syndicate One and existing angel investors, alongside lead investor Stride VC.
“I admit to passing on the company the first time around when I was introduced by Giulia Van Waeyenberge,” remembers Stride VC founder Fred Destin, citing his turndown email as symptomatic of the problem TechWolf was trying to solve: “Hi team - appreciate the ping on this one but unless you thought the founding team was incredible we will take a pass. I've seen a bunch of takes on the talent discovery issue and I can't get my head around how to hyperscale those and detect the winner.”
Luckily, a second intro materialised via Wim Vernaeve, at which point Fred finally paid attention, and he was blown away. The Series A became the largest first check Stride VC wrote in Fund II, and Wim reinvested. He adds:
“VC is a circus, but great outcome all around!”
TechWolf gains serious gravitas
After the Series A round, TechWolf grew its revenue 12x, and on 25 June 2024, it announced a Series B funding of $42,75 million, led by Felix Capital, with SAP, Workday Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures joining alongside previous investors. It was Julien Codorniou’s first lead investment after joining Felix Capital as a VC. Fred facilitated the introduction. “I'll always be grateful to Andreas, Jeroen and Mikaël for trusting a noob and giving me the opportunity to join their journey,” says the general partner of 20VC.
With Felix Capital’s support, TechWolf made its first push into the US. “What I loved a lot about our New York expansion was that it was incredibly well-planned,” says Andreas. Rather than importing a standard playbook, they moved some of their strongest people across the Atlantic, combined them with local hires and built the US business in a way that still felt like TechWolf. “It was probably the first major undertaking at TechWolf that worked because of deliberate planning and execution; where things didn’t just magically end up together.”
Diane Gherson, the former CHRO of IBM, joined TechWolf’s board around that time because she “knew they were filling a need that all HR departments desperately wanted”. But it wasn’t just the product that impressed her; the founders’ “remarkable brilliance, bottomless curiosity about HR, voracious ability to keep learning, humility and EQ” drew her in. “It has been a joy to introduce them to my CHRO colleagues in the US market and to see their business with the Fortune 500 take off over these last 18 months,” she adds, pointing to TechWolf’s revenue growing 15x from $1 million to $15 million during that time.
Fortino echoes this reasoning, which is why they also reinvested in the Series B, becoming TechWolf’s largest Belgian VC investor. “Some investments are mainly about the company. Others become about the people. TechWolf very much became the latter for me. This team has truly made a dent in the Belgian ecosystem,” explains managing partner Filip Van Innis. “What stood out was the combination of academic rigour, ambition and commercial instinct.”
Semper Virens and Andy Leaver from Notion (who led both SuccessFactors and Workday sales in EMEA) also joined the funding round.
SAP agrees to acquire TechWolf
TechWolf has been working with SAP since the Series B funding round, integrating into the software corporation’s cloud HCM suite, SuccessFactors. This has given them access to customers such as Atlas Copco Group, KLM, Ericsson, Arla Foods, AMD, UCB, Chiesi and HSBC, as well as leading system integrators (SIs) and consulting firms. It also united TechWolf with SmartRecruiters, further improving SuccessFactors’ competitiveness. “The SmartRecruiters deal gave SuccessFactors a best-in-class talent acquisition solution, solving a long-standing product weakness that TechWolf can leverage,” Thomas explains, adding that AI and functional synergies between TechWolf and SmartRecruiters also significantly enhance both products.
This brings us to why SAP wants to acquire TechWolf in 2026. Like its acquisitions of SmartRecruiters, Dremio, Reltio, Prior Labs and Signavio, TechWolf’s AI models and applied AI research team will become a key part of SAP’s talent and work intelligence strategy.
“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,” said Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for SAP Autonomous Suite and member of the Extended Board of SAP SE. “This grounding layer 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.”
The deal is expected to close in Q4 2026, subject to usual closing conditions, including regulatory approval. Following this, TechWolf will remain an independent entity under Andreas in its Ghent headquarters, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco. Its platform will remain available to both SAP and non-SAP customers.
“Venture is a long game. The best relationships are the ones where, at the end of one chapter, you already know you would happily start another one together on day one,” Filip points out.
“This is a fantastic outcome for the founders, the TechWolf team and everyone who backed them along the way… and an important one for the Belgian and European technology ecosystem.”
J.P. Morgan served as exclusive financial advisor to TechWolf. Kevin Cooper, Stephane Levy, Dannielle Collett, and Simon Trisk led the Cooley team advising TechWolf BV. Cooley also previously advised TechWolf BV on its Series A financing.
